Wow, Tom Tom wins stupid vendor move of the year (so far)

If you bought a TomTom global positioning system (GPS) over the past few months, congratulations, you may have gotten the bonus package. The company, which bills itself as “The smart choice in personal navigation,” confirmed this week that some of its GO 910 devices have shipped with a Windows virus pre-installed. The infected systems were all built during a one-week period around October 2006, TomTom said in a statement posted to its Web site. The affected systems are running version number 6.51 of the TomTom software.The company didn’t say how it managed to install malware on its products, but it warned that infected versions of the GO will try to copy the malicious software to a PC, when connected. News of the infection was first reported Sunday on the Daniweb.com Web site. Naturally TomTom isn’t the first company to make this kind of mistake. Apple accidentally shipped malware with some of its iPods last October and unfortunately there will be more in the future.