Thursday, September 13, 2007

The downside of popular programs

We all use them. Yahoo Messenger, Winamp, not to mention the whole suite of Windows applications. They are very popular, so they MUST be very good and very safe, right? Wrong!
Popular programs are hugely targeted by hackers and malware writers just for that reason. Because they're being used by so many people, it makes them such a sweet target. Of course they're updated regularly and there are many on the other side, trying to find bugs and patch them, but still, a lot of the times they are the first ones exploited.
You might say "Yeah, but since they're so widely used it has to mean they're the best". Actually, there are a lot of very good if not better alternatives to every popular program. Programmers try to write better functional versions of used programs every time. And a lot of them are free. Of course you won't have as much support to help you (there won't be so many pages discussing them) but that can also users had less problems using them.
Give it a try. If you use Yahoo Messanger or Winamp, or Nero: search for alternatives in the same category of software. You can use http://www.softpedia.com/ (my favorite ;) or whatever download site you like. You might find programs you like even more.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for writing this.