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| Spy Hunter Malware Software |
I tried to post my comment on the Biz Week comment forum, but apparently I am too long winded (yeah, I know, can you believe it? me, woman of a few (ok maybe a few hundred) words).
Anyway, ..here's my intended full comment:
I was in Shanghai in January (2010) for 3 weeks, coincidentally when Google had it's initial (public) tussel with China. I 'discovered' Baidu when it secretly installed itself on my laptop. It automatically defaulted itself as my search engine, even when I reset the defaut back to Google, then after Google.cn was shut down (thinking possibly that was the issue) trying yahoo and bing. With all, the defaul was reserve to Baidu. In addition I found Baidu popping up even when my browser wasn't open. The only solution I found for that was to unplug my ethernet cable and disable my wireless.
I had no luck uninstalling it, and could not find info on the secret of how to uninstall it online (with any and every search engine). However, when I returned to the States, and Googled 'uninstall Baidu' (try it! I just did it again and got a whole bunch more hits, i guess other people have encountered the same problem since January) I found several postings from blogs that gave me step by step info including using a freeware antivirus (my AVG and Norton/ Symmanted [SYMC] both did not find or alert me to Baidu as a 'problem') and 2 different freeware malware programs. All of which immediately 'discovered malicious files'.
After successfully uninstalling, de-worming, and virus cleaning my system, I went to my Ameritrade account an purchased a nice load of Baidu [BIDU] stock at $44.12 (today it is up 2.16% to $114.10) (I also recently bought some Google [GOOG] to balance out my Karma). I knew that with a business model like that they would quickly dominate the Chinese market where only through a VPN can someone access a uncensored portal. I also figured that although the talking heads on Bloomberg, CNBC, and CNN (pretty much the only TV I had in my hotel room) insisted that Microsoft's recently launched Bing would likely take over the Chinese search engine market, it wasn't likely.
Why would China allow a foreign company, even as "powerful" as Microsoft (btw, the power doesn't stop every corner market from selling pirated versions of Microsoft Operating Systems and Office) to profit from the multi billion $/yuan SE market. It is rather ironic for Microsoft, because not too long ago they fought a long battle to keep Internet Explorer as the default and uninstallable web software on any computer preloaded with Windows.
Gosh, it just all seems so parallel to world history, imperialism, conquering and then falling empires. And now, the US is in the same boat, sort of, where we will be number 2 to China.
