The Advertising Standards Agency is the UK’s regulatory body for advertisements. They’re the guys that investigate complaints. A couple of days ago I posted about Cisco’s misleading adverts that have been running on UK TV. Well, the ASA got back to one of the people who complained (of which there are now quite a few that I know of) with this little nugget.
You can see the full letter (sections blocked out to protect identities) here.
The letter goes on to say how nobody else has complained. This is not true. The letter also states that the complaint refers to a vulnerability on the Internet and is therefore not part of their remit. This is also untrue. This form of buck-passing is akin to telling people that it’s fine for people to say that smoking is perfectly healthy because the evidence pointing to the contrary is on the Internet. Cisco have admitted that their ’self defending network’ tools have vulnerabilities, something that we all knew would be the case from day one, yet they’re allowed to spin lies to an uneducated public, including many of those who’d make IT purchasing decisions.
I’m going to keep running on this for a while, my responses haven’t come back yet. I’ll post more as news comes in.
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