Suzi responds to iSearch

Just days after iSearch decided to hurl out their ominous, grey-suited lawyers of doom, the security sites faced with immediate legal action responded with something else:

Common sense.

Yes, who'd have thought that something so simple could be so utterly devastating to the men in grey. I guess in amongst Sleepy, Dopey and Bashful they accidentally swopped Clever for Stupid. And then fed Stupid with with Superdope, the breakfast of champions.

However, I've also recently been eating some very special breakfast cereal, and have had an amazing revelation. A revelation that changes everything.



How did I come about this incredible insight? Did I bang my head and, whilst in the otherworld, become imbued with the strength of ten tigers and the mind of Socrates? Did I swot up on legal mumbo-jumbo for six years then go back in time in my DeLorean? Or perhaps I swapped my brain for Ben Edelman's when he wasn't looking?

The answer is (amazingly enough) none of the above - I read the response to iSearch by Suzi, webmaster of Spywarewarrior.com.

And wouldn't you just know it? It turns out that not only did Spywarewarrior not actually write anything about iSearch (whoops!), they simply quoted some (4!) definition files that Ad-Aware had published on their site! (Double whoops!)

Rather different from the notion that Spywarewarrior.com was "Falsely disparaging iDowload’s product, iSearch, classifying the product as Malware, Spyware, the end of our age and the death of all mankind..."

As you can see, I used some poetic licence there.

But the point remains, these people fired the same utterly useless Cease & Desist missive at a site that hadn't actually done anything to cease and desist from.

That being so, can we expect any site - any site at all - who mentions an Ad-Aware definition file update to recieve the same letter? If so, that's a hell of a lot of sites. Maybe we should have a whipround for iSearch, because if they haven't put themselves out of business through the enormous postal bill they're going to wrack up, they're certainly going to be swapping software for flipping burgers when all those sites they have effectively slandered join together and sue their ass off for wrongful prosecution.

Congratulations iSearch, not only have you now pissed off an awful lot of people whose sites possess thousands and thousands of registered users, you have also managed to reinforce the notion in the popular press of companies with big brother tendancies, who serve writs without thinking and produce products the majority of us would rather not have on our machines.

I'd say that was a result, wouldn't you?