Named & Shamed
SOFTWARE WARNING!
21WHAT ARE THEY BARRY’S VILLAIN OF THE FORTNIGHT
TALKING ABOUT?Issue 633 • 8 – 21 June 2022LLOYDS BANK
The only genuine Audacity here is the one with the green tickBarry Collins puts the boot into tech villains, jargon-
spouting companies and software trying to trick you
Audacity clones in the Microsoft Store
G
iven the sheer volume of junk and
rip-offs in the Microsoft Store, it
amazes me that respectable
software companies even want to appear
in it. However, it seems those rip-offs are
the very reason Audacity finally decided
to include its audio-recording app.
“Due to the ludicrous number of fake
Audacitys on the Microsoft store, which
charge users for non-functional or very
limited applications, I’ve now (finally)
taken the name back and have published
the proper, free version for the first time,”
read a recent tweet from Martin Keary,
head of product at Audacity (www.
snipca.com/41963).
It’s not hard to see why Keary’s upset.
Search for Audacity, and beneath Keary’s
legitimate product are several others
carrying a thinly disguised version of the
company’s logo that charge three or four
quid. You can see them in the screenshot
above right. Under the official Audacity
(with the green tick^1 ) are four copycat
apps that use the Audacity name and a
distorted version of the logo. Anyone
casually browsing for it would be fooled.I downloaded an app with the hideous
title ‘Audio Editor base Audacity
Windows’^2. Once Microsoft had taken
my money and the app was installed, I
clicked Open. It used the same code as
the genuine Audacity. It was literally the
same files. Other apps, including ‘Audio
Editor PRO using Audacity’^3 and AudioEditor Pro Audacity Portable^4 show
screenshots that are blatantly Audacity
by another name.
It’s shocking that Microsoft allows
unscrupulous people to abuse
open-source software in this way. You
could say that I can’t believe it has the
audacity to get away with it.When scammers phoned
Margaret Lippard, 81,
pretending to be from
Amazon, they asked her
to check her account for
unauthorised purchases.
They then stole £55,000 from the
accounts of the Bargoed Community
Hub – the charity she ran in south
Wales helping families who are
struggling with poverty and loneliness.
Her bank, Lloyds, initially refused
to refund the money, even though it
had made no attempt to check it wasMargaret making
the payments. The
bank backtracked
following negative
publicity, but it was too
late: the charity was
forced to close.
Margaret has said she will give the
reimbursed money to people in the
community for other charitable
projects, but this wouldn’t have been
necessary if Lloyds had coughed up
straight away. Read more at http://www.
snipca.com/41973.WHAT THEY SAY
Microsoft’s New Future of Work Report
http://www.snipca.com/41972
“Managers should consider how
teams and tools are partners forming
‘technologized team relationships’.
Technologized team relationships are
those in which the technology is an
intermediator, an active participant that
influences, and is also influenced by, the
human actors in the relationship.”WHAT THEY MEAN
People need computers to work as a
team, though that doesn’t contain enough
long words to make us sound important.1
(^234)