ZoneAlarm using scare tactics to sell bits

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I think it stinks.ZoneAlarm has started showing a bogus “Virus Warning” dialog to ZoneAlarm Free users, trying to get them to pay for the retail versi
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I stopped using ZA a few years ago, as I saw them going downhill, great firewall, but suspicious activities had me look elsewhere.

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I left a series of nasty comments in various forums the last time Check Point started telling free customers that their PCs had “errors” on them, and they needed to buy something to get these “errors” fixed. That was an ad co-op with Iolo, makers of Registry Mechanic.

This is different. Check Point is telling EVERY free customer that they need to be protected against threats which Check Point has not even scanned to find. In other words, you need to buy Alligator Insurance even if you live in Alaska. Enough is enough!

There are better firewalls out there than Zone Alarm. I use Comodo on my Windows XP laptop. True, there are more UAC-like pop up alerts with Comodo than with Zone Alarm, but Comodo has never hassled me to upgrade.

If you look at Leak Test data, Zone Alarm has lately fallen farther and farther behind its competitors. Enough said.

To be fair to Zone Alarm, Avast has hassled me to upgrade, but not in an intrusive way.

No boycott necessary — the market will sort itself out as more and more people try alternatives to Zone Alarm. And the Internet will become a safer place.

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The “don’t make me eat crow” dance ZA is doing now is typical strategies from the ZA marketing weenies and execs.

Remember back about 5 years, there was a part of Zone Alarm’s firewall that (alarmingly) phoned home … to Zona Alarm? At the time, ZA first claimed it was untrue, then that it was a glitch they were unaware of. This left customers feeling that either a) the execs wouldn’t own up to the nastiness they’d done, and ZA couldn’t be trusted, or b) ZA hadn’t bothered to do ANY testing of their firewall, which surely would have revealed such a basic flaw. That “bug/feature”, by the way, was easy to spot, in easily read XML, IIRC.

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I’m glad I discontinued use of ZoneAlarm almost a decade ago.

Note to Woody: Lavasoft has mentioned the link to your Infoworld Tech Watch blog about ZA Creator’s “scare tactics” on their web site in the Twitter section.

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