Quote:
geoschmo said:
What I think is funny is that a lot of people will hear that and think it's a perfectly reasonable theory. But if I tried to say most vandalism was done by people in the house-painting industry, or that most arson was done by firefighters people would say I was a tin-foil crackpot. 
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The differences is that it is a lot easier to get away with writing and releasing a virus than it is to commit arson or vandalism.
Also, there are companies out there that write spyware that does nothing other than serve ads to you for their anti-spyware product, telling you that you are infected with spyware and that their program can remove it... Or they will have "ads" that infect you with some spyware and advertise their product. They then provide a free demo that will scan and detect the spyware that they infected you with, but do nothing about it. You then have to buy their program to remove the spyware. This is not crackpot tin-foil hat theory, there have been proven cases of this... It is not that great of a leap to suspect less scrupulous anti-virus companies of doing such a thing. The major companies probably don't, as they have too much to risk. But I bet there are little startup "companies" out there that are just trying to scam you out of money, like 9% of the rest of the internet (where the other 90% is porn, leaving about 1% for legitimate content)...