Maybe because they read articles like the one in this morning’s Washington Post, entitled Trouble Can Be Downloaded Along With Music. The competition is pretty fierce, but I rate this as a strong contender for the worst piece of computer journalism of 2004. The author clearly understands nothing about music downloading, viruses, adware, spyware, and related technologies. But that doesn’t stop him from delivering eleven paragraphs of pure confusion.
Here’s a sample:
[T]echnology security experts warn that many of this holiday season’s millions of newbie MP3 player owners don’t know what dangers lurk behind some music.
“The risk has skyrocketed,” says Kraig Lane, group product manager at the computer-security products manufacturer Symantec. “The bad guys are putting evil agents into music files and even videos that we are downloading. Music files especially. And you don’t know it’s there.”
The big problem is that some music services — particularly the free and legally questionable peer-to-peer (P2P), file-swapping networks like Kazaa, BearShare and LimeWire that connect millions of home-computer users — deliver something in addition to free software and music. They sneak in adware — or, even worse, viruses and spyware.
Even reputable online music stores sometimes install adware….
The author then goes on, just a few sentences later, to mention iTunes, eMusic, and Wal-Mart’s music store. Do any of those services deliver viruses? No. Do any of those services bundle adware or spyware with their software? I don’t think so. But anyone who reads this story is bound to be thoroughly confused, and alarmed for no good reason. My goodness, they better not download any music, and they better buy some software to protect themselves from all that evil adware and spyware. Hmmm. Which software to buy? Well, the only “expert” quoted in the story is some guy from Symantec, and the author approvingly mentions not only Symantec’s online spyware-scanning service but also its Norton Internet Security.
And what’s this crap about “evil agents” in music and video files? You mean downloaded files that claim to be music files might actually be executable programs? Or does “evil agents” mean something else? We simply don’t know. But if the guy from Symantec says to be afraid, well, we should be afraid. Oh, and we should buy Symantec’s software, right?
Good lord, no wonder people get confused by this stuff.
Ed Bott 
Ed, you don’t seem to be much of a fan of Symantec’s software. 🙂 I used to be, especially in the pre-XP days when I could get Norton Utilities separately from Systemworks and Symantec had not yet decided that it wanted to be about internet security rather than PC performance and stability. Now I prefer Trend-Micro, as you do.