If you hate RealPlayer, or RealOne, or whatever they’re calling it these days, as much as I do, this rant is a must-read:

“When you install Real Player, you can either choose an express install, or custom install. If you pick express install, Real Player simply installs itself with every option and feature turned on. If you choose the custom install, the process is a blend between an installer and a Pokemon-like game of gotta-uncheck-all-checkboxes.”

Amazingly, the author got several anonymous replies from frustrated employees at Real, who forwarded several internal memos. (You can read the leaked memos here.)

The whole thing should be mandatory reading for anyone in the software business who wants to learn how NOT to treat their customers.

This kind of stuff drives me nuts. CNN has a story today headlined Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail. (Update: This story was taken from the AP wire service and was slightly edited by CNN. But still…)

In the first paragraph, the story reads: “…Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying ‘stamps’ for e-mail. … At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn’t significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day. Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time.”

Of course, if you keep reading you realize that those statements have no basis in fact. Later, the report says, accurately, “…Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. … Instead of paying a penny, the sender would ‘buy’ postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender’s good faith.”

No money. No penny per message. But it’s much sexier to put out the distorted message that greedy Bill G. wants more of your money.

Back to J-school, CNN.

A friend forwarded an e-mail that claims Bill Gates wants to charge everyone a penny in “postage” for every e-mail message sent. Welcome to the world of urban legends, where the message is only casually related to the truth.

This is not an updated version of the ancient “US Postal Service 5-cent tax” urban legend. Nor is it related to the old “FCC Internet Tax” myth. The new story is a distorted and oversimplified summary of one of many proposals currently making the rounds to combat spam. Bill Gates mentioned it in a speech, but it’s not his idea nor is it at the top of Microsoft’s list of preferred solutions.

Under the most common variations of this type of plan, personal email would continue to be free, but bulk senders would be forced to pay a penny or so per message. In the idea that Gates has mentioned, any unidentified sender would be forced to offer a monetary amount for you to read an email. If you identify the person as a friend, there’s no charge, but a spammer would have to pay, conceivably as much as 20 cents per message that actually gets read. It’s a complicated idea and I doubt it will ever take off. Details are in this USA Today story.

An alternate proposal from Microsoft Research is called the Penny Black project. Under this scheme, message senders would have to pay a price in CPU cycles or some form of math challenge (which would be solved by the computer, not by the user!). This would result in an imperceptible slowdown for the average person, but would seriously impact someone cranking out thousands of messages a day.

There’s also a controversial proposal called the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), which is designed to stop e-mails with forged “From” addresses; it works by checking the IP address of a message sender to determine whether it’s authorized to use the SMTP server from which the message was sent. A Microsoft version of that called “Caller ID.” You can read about it here.

Bottom line: Free e-mail is here for the foreseeable future. Any truly effective solution to spam is going to take a long time to implement, and it’s going to be fraught with unintended consequences. If someone tells you they have a foolproof solution, they’re trying to fool you.

From Techdirt: Comcast Finally Takes Action Against Zombie Machines.

Well, it’s about freakin’ time. As one of the linked stories notes, five specific IP addresses alone were responsible for more than 45,000 pieces of spam. It isn’t difficult to identify an infected machine by its behavior, and giving the clueless user a stern warning followed by a block on their ability to send mail is the right idea. In fact, shutting down their Internet connection completely until they clean up the virus is an even better idea.

Now, all Comcast has to do is get their support staff on board. My sister and her husband are Comcast subscribers. A couple weeks ago, they lost the ability to send e-mail. I spent several hours on the phone with them and told them they were probably blocked. But when they called Comcast support, they were given a variety of incorrect and sometimes comical answers. The best one was that they had “clogged the e-mail server” and would just have to wait a couple days until the messages had cleared out. Riiiiiiight.

That, of course, was ludicrous. After several hours getting escalated to various people, my sister finally got to the abuse department, which notified her that their account had been blocked for sending spam – apparently because my brother-in-law had sent a newsletter to 500 subscribers. Gee, it would have been nice if Comcast would have sent them a notice of the possible violation of terms of service first…

One of my all-time heroes, Neil Young, just did an interview with Wired. Great stuff.

On fans who trade bootleg shows: “When I play a new song in concert, it’s immediately uploaded. Everyone has heard it before I put the record out. For a while, that was a negative thing for me. But with Greendale, I started using it deliberately.”

On lawsuits: “I can’t control what people do. I don’t want to.” (RIAA, are you listening?)

On MP3s: “MP3 quality sucks.” (Yeah, which is why I won’t pay anyone 99 cents for a compressed audio track that sounds like garbage in my living room.)

The man is a genius.

Robert Scoble piggybacks on Joel Spolsky’s list of 12 rules on how to run a beta test. According to Robert, there should be a 13th rule: “Reward top testers.”

I couldn’t agree more. So Robert, how about passing the word to the Office team that sending a cheap trinket to the Office 2003 beta testers (a little AM/FM headphone radio with a value of a buck or two) was not a good way to win friends and influence testers.

My latest Expert Zone article is available. Windows XP Support Secrets includes links to a couple of my favorite third-party support sites as well as some tips for smarter Google searches.

After PC Magazine gave its Editors’ Choice award to Webroot Software’s Spy Sweeper 2.2, I thought I might give this alternative a try.

I can sum up my experience in one word: Ugh.

Installation went smoothly enough. I had no trouble installing the program, which has a clean, easy-to-follow interface. Unlike PC Mag, though, I tested this software not on a test PC infested with viruses and other pests, but on my own system, on which I carefully control the software installed. I can say with confidence that my PC is spyware-free.

So imagine my shock when Spy Sweeper’s half-hour examination turned up 51 “traces” of spyware and adware. Ha! The majority of these offending bits of digital debris were simply cookies, many of them from innocuous sites like Travelocity, com.com (an alias for CNET and ironically, a close cousin of PC Magazine), and Pricegrabber.

More disturbing was the fact that Spy Sweeper identified a couple of perfectly legitimate programs as spyware. According to the sweep results, I was infested with a known adware program called BrowserAid. The file identified was actually a key part of TechSmith‘s excellent screen-capture utility, SnagIt. Spy Sweeper also told me my system had been taken over by something called Eacceleration. That also turned out to be wrong; the DLL that it found was actually the virus-scanning module from my CD/DVD burning program of choice, Nero 6 Ultra Edition.

Spy Sweeper also complained about SideStep, a wonderful Internet Explorer add-in that clearly identifies itself and has an admirable privacy policy. It is ludicrous to call SideStep adware or spyware.

If I had followed Spy Sweeper’s advice, I would have disabled at least three programs I rely on heavily. An unsophisticated user would have never figured out that Spy Sweeper was wrong and would probably have wiped out these innocent programs.

Ad-Aware 6 and Spybot S&D had no trouble keeping their mitts off my perfectly legitimate software. And both are free, in contrast to the $30 Spy Sweeper.

Security software that can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys isn’t worth paying for. It’s not even worth downloading for free. My advice: Stay away from Spy Sweeper.

Yahoo Search is getting a lot of good press lately for its new search engine design. A lot of the ink is coming from people who think Google needs some competition. Fair enough.

But Yahoo has a long, long way to go before it earns my trust. Case in point: Type spybot into Yahoo’s search box and this is what you get:

I’ve blacked out the names and URLs of the companies that purchased the ads that appear at the top of this list, because they don’t deserve any publicity. They’re deliberately capitalizing on the good name of Spybot S&D to lure unsophisticated or distracted Web searchers into clicking their links. Instead of getting the real thing for free, you wind up at a Web site offering an inferior product for a frightful amount of money. In both of these examples, the sales pitch is misleading and filled with unnecessary scare tactics.

It’s bad enough that these copycat companies are trying to steal the good name of the Spybot folks. In my opinion, Yahoo is playing right into their hands by not clearly differentiating the search results. Those “sponsored listings” at the top look just like the real search results that appear below. And I have already heard from two people who were duped.

Google, unfortunately, is only a little better. The same search produces two “sponsored links” above the real search listings. They don’t look exactly like the search results, but they also don’t look like ads. And that’s the point. How difficult could it be to put the words PAID ADVERTISEMENT beneath each listing? That way, we’d know exactly what it is. Both companies deserve scorn for deliberately deceiving their customers.

If you’re responsible for a computer that you think has been infected by any variant of the Mydoom virus/worm, download this new Mydoom Worm Removal Tool (KB836528) from Microsoft.