Originally posted by kuhl
reply to post by Cadbury

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Although there was a lot of spam later,origanally they were erasing questions which were well put without being insulting.They censored anything with pifts.exe in it.Hopefully we have some screen grabs earlier in this thread.

Originally posted by Cadbury
reply to post by XXXN3O

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But didn't the spam start after they'd already removed the legitimate queries they've now labelled as "collateral damage?"

Originally posted by Cyberzone
reply to post by Cadbury

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Same not buying it. If it was that, why not make a more normal looking file. Give more info. And als why send the info to microsoft and some other wierd location. And why work with Google?

Washington Post

Update, 2:23 p.m. ET:

Dave Cole, senior director of product management at Symantec, said the PIFTS file was part of a "diagnostics patch" shipped to Norton customers on Monday evening. The purpose of the update, Cole said, was to help determine how many customers would need to be migrated to newer versions of its software as more Windows users upgrade to Windows 7.

"We have to make sure before we migrate users to a new product that we can see what kind of load we can expect on our servers, and which customers are going to have to be moved up to the latest version of our product," Cole said.

As to why Symantec has been deleting posts about this from their user forum, Cole said the company noticed that minutes after the update went out hundreds of new users began registering on the forum, leaving inane and sometimes abusive comments.

"We want to be out there in the community, but by the same token, if we see abuse we will shut it down pretty quickly," Cole said. "There was no attempt at secrecy here, but people were spamming the forum and making it unusable to everyone."

In Symantec's defense, when I first heard about this earlier this morning, I noted privately to a couple of folks that some of the comments being left on the Symantec forum bore many of the hallmarks of "4Chan," (a.k.a. "anonymous"), a virtual community that thrives on playing practical jokes and causing trouble online. The summary about this incident posted to News-for-nerds site Slashdot this morning links to a key 4Chan forum.