Symantec Anti-Virus Supresses Privacy Tool

salimfadhley writes "Symantec's 'Norton Antivirus' now attempts to remove Freegate, a program designed to help Chinese internet users view websites blocked by the government firewalls. Symantec offered no reason why the program (which is not spyware) was marked as a 'trojan' in Chinese versions of the software, however even an unattuned conspiracy theorist will guess that this was done at the request of the Chinese government. "

Comments

Re:Where's the follow up with Symantec?

[ctr2sprt]

Norton Antivirus, like some other AV systems, tries to detect unknown viruses using common patterns. This results in it occasionally coming up with false positives, especially of programs which share common characteristics with viruses and trojans. For example, it used to spot pretty much any keygen as a virus, though it no longer does.

With all due respect to conspiracy theorists, this may be all that's happening here. What's the first task of a really good virus or trojan? Bypassing defenses, both of the machine and the nearby network. Any program which does those things is inherently suspicious. This is not to say the conspiracy theorists are wrong, mind you, merely that there are other possibilities.

Don't like Symantec? Try an alternative...

[stefanlasiewski]

AVG Antivirus is a great alternative to Symantec's Norton AntiVirus.

It's free for home users, has a memory-resident scanner, scheduled updates, limited scheduled scans and doesn't bog down your system with unnecessary crap like the Norton or Mcafee anti-virus programs.

Re:Um...

[oldosadmin]

Pretty well... yeah

All of them are obnoxious.

McAfee being the most so... it has one of those tray popups which will kill your fullscreen game.

PC-Cillin I don't think does anything obnoxious, but I haven't used it for a few years.

EZ-Trust Antivirus will popup a web browser directed to their site.

I think that's about it. I've never used Panda. I don't use a virus scanner, personally. I have a firewall and I'm the only one with access to my computer, and I only run trusted executables.

So wouldn't the obvious solution be..

[bairy]

Don't use Norton if you wanna use Freegate?