Oh, censorship!
I made a polite and reasonable post on the Norton forums asking a few on the record questions. Amidst a sea of spam threads posted by The Internet, curious Anons bumped my thread hoping for a legitimate response. It lasted a few hours, but it seems their team finally organized…
… and what do you know? A legitimate thread was deleted.
Hiding from the media is a stupid idea. If it’s not me, it’ll be someone bigger. Dealing with journalists and 4chan is like trying to get my seventeen year old sister home before curfew. Scream all you want, but they’re going to do what they want, regardless. They find a way around the tiniest loophole or technicality.
*yawn* Still haven’t slept. Stupid midterms.
- Aubrey
Tags: censorship, comspiracy, forum, Symantec, Virus
March 11th, 2009 at 7:24 am
Symantec explain their update and why they deleted the posts:
Dave Cole, senior director of product management at Symantec, said the PIFTS file was part of a “diagnostics patch” shipped to Norton customers on Monday evening. The purpose of the update, Cole said, was to hep determine how many customers would need to be migrated to newer versions of its software as more Windows users upgrade to Windows 7.
“We have to make sure before we migrate users to a new product that we can see what kind of load we can expect on our servers, and which customers are going to have to be moved up to the latest version of our product,” Cole said.
As to why Symantec has been deleting posts about this from their user forum, Cole said the company noticed that minutes after the update went out hundreds of new users began registering on the forum, leaving inane and sometimes abusive comments.
“We want to be out there in the community, but by the same token, if we see abuse we will shut it down pretty quickly,” Cole said. “There was no attempt at secrecy here, but people were spamming the forum and making it unusable to everyone.”