It seems at least the details of the misprint have been solved. While the article itself correctly shows spybot.info as the URL, the wrong URL which leads to a fraud site is in the back of the magazine under Contact info for Protection software.

And even though this misleading information has lead dozens of people into paying for a fraud product, Consumer Reports now, after two weeks, finally reacted by sending an email - saying they will not even look into this problem of a misleading URL if I cannot proof contact information through an official letterhead. While at the same time admitting that Consumer Reports' official letterhead information I used did not reach the correct department, therefore the answer was delayed two weeks.

So where we are now is that we have an organisation dedicated to Consumer protection that does not accept information about critical errors that costs their readers money from the same readers. No, we need to design and print a new letterhead with the information for the correct contact information just to have them even look at a mistake. Meanwhile, at the speed which with Consumer Reports reacts, the time they may actually inform their readers, the credit card companies period of objection will most probably be over.

The past look of our website was quite a few years old already, with constant complaints about how "five years back" it looked. And while we personally don't care a lot about adding fancy things like Flash or too much Javascript to a website, keeping it easy and scalable, we decided to improve it in a few places at least, removing the heavy black bar and making the boxes around the text a bit less static. We'll probably also keep adding small improvements over the next weeks; if the page looks funny today, please be patient with us.

Another reason would be to make the site more distinguished from others, especially fraud sites copying our look to fool users. And that's also a reason for this post: to assure you that you have not been hijacked, but this is still the real one and & only page of Spybot - Search & Destroy.

The september issue of Consumer Reports contains a test on anti spyware products. Sadly, the persons who conducted the test were not really working concentrated I guess, since while recommending our product, they printed a wrong URL. If you visit the URL Consumer Reports printed, you'll reach one of the fraud sites mentioned in our August 4th news.

That in itself might have been a typo or mistake, but since we received a lot of emails from people who fell for the fraud site, we contacted Consumer Reports with the plea to please warn people about the wrong URL in their next issue. Consumer Reports - who as an nonprofit organization for consumers should have a real interest to help their readers - didn't even care to answer our requests.

Update: Things get even more confusing: we've now got three people quoting the magazine to show spybot.info correctly, and six people telling that it shows safer-networking.com. With communications with Consumer Reports not possible, we're not really sure if these are different prints with the error corrected while things were in print, or differences between print/electronic versions.

And since this article is already about reviews, let's name some positive news as well. Spybot-S&D received the Chip Online Users pick 2006 award, for example. And that's only one of many, we'll update our press section shortly.