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Holland Bans AMD's 'Virus Protection' Campaign

Posted by timothy on from the puffery-is-strictly-for-cafes dept.

Hack Jandy writes "For those of you who didn't see this coming, AMD's Advanced Virus Protection campaign has been banned in Holland since the technology does (almost) nothing to stop viruses! If you recall, AMD's NX bit attempts to stop the processor from executing pages on the stack that have been written to. Does NX even solve more problems than it causes?"

1 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. How do you explain it to Joe Sixpack? by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Informative

    What the "NX bit" actually does is a pretty nice thing for preventing buffer overflows... if a segment of memory is marked for data use and then the code execution point somehow arrives there, you get a crash-out instead of the execution of arbitrary code.

    Of course, AMD's problem is finding a way to try to communicate that concept to the average user. Joe Sixpack doesn't even know what buffer overflow problem is, so they don't understand why they need a solution to that problem. AMD is trying to use the concept of "virus prevention" instead, but apparently they've gone too far in implying that the NX bit eliminates the need for conventional anti-virus methods, which it most certainly does not.

    This is an extra set of suspenders, not a new belt.