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[RegDCP]

Why we don't trust Devil Mountain Software (and neither should you)

A great job of sluthing a company that could have an eye on everything you do.

Larry Dignan hits hard.

Quote:We asked a team of researchers to look more carefully at Devil Mountain Software and its Exo Performance Network (XPNet) to find out more about the company and its data. What we found is alarming: Dubious claims about the company’s products and its customers; violations of privacy involving the company’s data collection software; and Web posts and interviews with a source who appears to be certainly fictitious.

What I find V scary is

Quote:By connecting his PC to our network, he made his raw system metrics data available to us.

and following that, the mention of their clients.

Quote:The benchmark software, dubbed DMS Clarity Suite, was created by former Intel performance engineers, and is deployed commercially at financial firms, he said, including Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston, as well as on Wall Street trading floors, where PC performance problems may mean millions down the drain.

The implications. Wow.

Just think, that software could be tied into traffic cam / webcam systems, into government data banks, financial institutions, news systems or anything that required performance monitoring. The software is free.

Hell they could probably find out when you last farted. And where. AND have a photo of you doing it.
[b]PERHAPS your webcam and mic are not really off??

[deathshadow]

They've been discussing this over on OSNews for a while.

It all started when these jokers claimed that Windows 7 had "alarmingly low amounts of free physical RAM" - because they were too stupid to understand what prefetch was, or to take how much memory is auto-released cache and how much is consumed by actual programs - SHADES of the memory claims when Vista and Server2k8 dropped.

As I said on OSNews, I wonder how these ignorant dipshits at Devil Mountain would react to your average *nix server... Like say, my Debian one.

top - 08:44:10 up 269 days, 21:40, 1 user, load average: 0.20, 0.52, 0.59
Tasks: 111 total, 2 running, 109 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 12.3%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 85.9%id, 1.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1996448k total, 1728400k used, 268048k free, 111808k buffers
Swap: 5847620k total, 6740k used, 5840880k free, 1121320k cached

Oh noes, it only has 268 megs of it's 2 gigs free... Oh wait, 90% of that memory use is PHP (APC) and mySQL cache...

Just goes to prove you don't have to know the first thing about Operating Systems to slap together some script kiddy metrics tracking crapplet in visual basic, then market it to the type of people who think you can get serious technical advice in Forbes magazine.

These guys and their software are only one step removed from the bastards who make those fake anti-virus popups, ranking right up there with the 'registry cleaners' the majority of which usually do more harm than good. (there are what, two legitimate ones and the rest are malware?)

Of course they were immediately challenged on their nonsensical/ignorant claims, which is when they were DUMB ENOUGH to retaliate by using one of the magazine writers usage statistics was only further fueled the shitstorm.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/business/unfo...ending-357

Turns out that Devil Mountain's alleged CEO isn't even a real person, but a sock puppet for one for the writers at Infoworld, who's been sacked over the whole mess.

But it goes with something I often say - magazine/news-writers know how to write and are hired to write; they rarely know enough about the subject they are writing about to be trusted as a source of information. Like my grandpappy used to say "Whenever you see a news article about something you were involved in or have direct knowledge of, they get every single detail wrong. If you cannot trust them for things you know about, how can you possibly trust them about things you don't?"