This is great! For Christmas, my wife and I bought digital picture frames for my parents and her parents. We looked at all the different ones and picked one from Insignia because it was a good trade-off between price, features, and picture size.

Well, wouldn't you know it I found out today that a few of the very model that we bought were infected with a computer virus.

You can read Insignia's announcement here.

The article states that the virus was an older virus that is easily detected and deleted by current anti-virus software. At Christmas, I loaded some photos onto each of the frames before we wrapped them up and I didn't detect a virus when the frame was connected our computer, so I feel pretty safe that the ones we bought were ok. But it really sucks that I now have to tell my dad and my wife's parents to watch our for their "nice" new Christmas gifts.

The picture frames were purchased at Best Buy. Its not Best Buy's fault that they were defective, however I do think that Best Buy should have moved quickly to alert their customers. I would have respected that. I have read that there is an announcement from Best Buy but I have yet to see or hear it and so I am disappointed in Best Buy.

I first heard about this when my wife saw an article appear on The Red Tape Chronicles on MSNBC.com. You can read that article here.

Insignia is the one who should really be ashamed. They are the ones who manufactured this product. I am glad to see that they have this article up on the front of their web page, but how many people saw that? I don't make a habit of visiting Insignia's web page. They should have done more to prevent this and done more to alert their customers. Is Insignia going to be liable to any of their customers who lost data or had their lives disrupted by having to deal with a computer disaster like loosing data or worse spreading across a network or hurting someone's reputation by sending out spam emails?