Chutzpah, cajones, cheek, liver, gumption, moxie. Whatever word you use to describe it, you have to admit that it takes bucketfulls to put out the kind of marketing message that eEye's sent out this morning. In case you haven't seen what I'm talking about, eEye says they want to build a gigantic honeypot with your machine as the bait. For those unfamiliar with the term, a honeypot is "a computer set up to collect security data by deliberately attracting online attacks". Now, I suspect that eEye doesn't mean by this that they're going to "deliberately attract online attacks" to machines running their client (at least let's hope), and most other client security vendors already collect anonymous data from systems running their client (most ask you first if you want to participate.) But I have to say that I was definitely surprised and a bit impressed by eEye's post-modern, punk-rock, "your machine, our bitch" marketing message.
However, bold marketing aside, I'm not going to participate in the free Blink offer. I've tested this product in the lab and observed a "marked decrease in system stability" on machines running Blink - I'd like to go into more specifics on this, but the research was conducted under contract so I can't. I can tell you though, that we couldn't run certain tests because portions of the performance and stability test harness wouldn't run after installing the product (e.g. cygwin wouldn't run and the COSBI profiler blue-screened the machine) on "vanilla" installs of the OS. So, unless eEye is going to support the hell out of this freebie (doubtful), I'm keeping it off my machine.
Note that our experiences were just that - our experiences; there are always tons of factors in play: maybe new versions of the product have solved this problem, maybe the problem was unique to the specific machines involved in our tests, or maybe there was no problem and we were just using it wrong...
Posted by Ed at October 18, 2006 07:03 AM | TrackBack