internet search | Direct Marketing Observations

Here is what we as a society care about, according to the Lycos 50.

Thats great, Poker, Paris Hilton, Golf Clubs, Project Runway, Britney, MySpace, and Clay Aiken (wtf?). Interestingly enough, stretching beyond the top 15 and looking at the next 10, there is absolutely nothing in there about, global warming, world hunger, the Iraq war, the presidential election or the oil spill in S.F., Though in the 20 spot we do have something about pink ribbons and breast cancer awareness-finally a web search about something with meaning and substance. Without going any further, I can assure you that all we care about are things that stimulate us one way or the other.

Let’s see, our children keep getting their lead based toys taken away from them, our tires keep going flat, we have the worst case of Montezumas revenge from the seafood, my dog has been sick for weeks and won’t fetch, my teeth are falling out and the family art project with the aquadots has caused everyone to pass out and now this…

If you have purchased a Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 product since August 2007 the product may be infected with a virus. Kaspersky Labs, a maker of anti-virus software, has alerted Seagate to the existence of a virus found on at least one Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 product. Seagate has traced this issue to a small number of units produced by a Maxtor sub-contract manufacturer located in China.

Seagate quickly put a stop ship to units leaving the facility as soon as the company learned of the probable infection. All units now leaving the facility in question have been cleared of the virus and units in inventory are being reworked before being released for sale. However, some affected units may have been sold to the public before the problem was detected.

Seagate has posted a warning on its website about its Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drives. According to the posting, Seagate traced the issue to a “small number” of units produced by a Maxtor Chinese sub-contractor.

The effects of this virus are minimal. According to Kaspersky the virus is the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah, a molar virus that searches for passwords to online games and sends them to a server located in China. It also deletes other molar viruses and can disable virus detection software. All of the known games affected are Chinese with the exception of World of Warcraft. The following games are affected.WSGame
91.com
QQ
Woool
rxjh.17game.com
TianLongBaBu
AskTao
Perfect World (Wanmei Shijie)
World of WarcraftA word to the wise, Baidu is one of the hottest internet properties in the world and China has a population of 1.3 billion, about 130 million of whom are Internet users, an online market second in size only to the American market. Having said that, Could the next big headline be, “Baidu users infected with worlds worst virus…”?