So I loaded my normal list of cartoons and news for this morning – “Open in Tabs” is such a marvellous feature – and about halfway through my Safari browser flashed-up an error alert – which stops everything – to say:
www.errorsafe.comNOTICE: If your computer has errors in the registry database of file system it could cause unpredictable or erratic behaviour, freezes and crashes. Fixing these errors can increase your computer’s performance and prevent data loss.
Would you like to install ErrorSafe to check your computer for free? (Recommended)
Use of an Alert Box for advertising struck me as being rather naughty, not to mention the use of the word “(Recommended)” – my emphasis in the above – without saying that it was the vendor, not the OS manufacturer, recommending this; but as a Mac user and with a reasonable idea of what is/is not a risk I decided to play along:
It opened a large JavaScript panel above my Dilbert cartoon (I wonder if United Media can be held liable for whom advertises on their site?) and popped open a confirmation box, proudly asserting:
This file has been digitally signed and independently certified as 100% free of viruses, adware and spyware.
…although after what happened next, I remain to be convinced:
A complex animated Progress Bar – in MS-Windows colours and style – scrolled from left to right, ticking-off the tests that it was performing and telling me that it found 50 – a whole fifty! – “System Errors” on my machine.
Fifty Windows errors, on my G4 Apple MacOS 10.3.9 iMac. Yeah, really. It also auto-downloaded a .EXE file from their home base and presented it to me for execution.
This appears to be a truly lame confidence trick; aside from the fact that my browser dows not have permission to make those sorts of test upon underlying operating system files, there is the small matter of my being on the completely wrong operating system for it to execute anyway.
There is a possible mitigation that my being an Apple Mac user may be the cause of those 50 errors, but aside from the cluelessness implied by that possibility (that they do not trap the possibility) there is no way in hell I would use software that was advertised by such a hard sell, howeverso much it is “(Recommended)“.
Also: their logo looks astonishingly similar to that of the Victorinox Swiss-Army Knife.
Caveat browser.
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