Samizdata - 8:46 pm on Jul 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

From the article:

Last Thursday, Web masters around the world noticed unusual spikes in traffic

That one had me in stitches. But then so have many of the other attempts at "journalism" that are now plastered all over the web and getting the story hopelessly wrong - I have even seen one saying that LinkScanner affected your site's ranking in the SERPs.

Thompson said "it doesn't pretend to pre-scan. It just works off the local blacklist.

I think "pretends to prefetch" is a reasonable assessment given that the user experience has not changed and that LinkScanner does not actually "scan" links as it did before, and I don't think changing the phraseology of the question really gives Mr Thompson any wriggle-room.

But such nonsense is to be expected from that source - as in "we still enable those webmasters who want to filter our requests out of their results to do so" (but we won't tell them how).

"The real issue is that, like it or not, we're at war on the Web," said Thompson.

The real issue is that he went to war against the wrong people and lost.

He should count himself lucky that the real story of how his software was a security risk to his customers was completely bungled by The Register, and that everyone else just copied their reports.

As Jim said elsewhere, our concern should be the effect (if any) that the castrated software has on our servers. AVG Technologies seem to have done the right thing, albeit belatedly, and Mr Thompson is no longer a problem for anyone except those who pay his salary.

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