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MS AntiSpyware vs Ad-Aware vs. SpyBot
An anonymous reader writes "Flexbeta.net compares Microsoft's new spyware fighting tool, Windows AntiSpyware, to Ad-Aware and SpyBot S&D; the two leading spyware tools on the market today. The review sets up an infected PC using VMWare Workstation and scans the machine using all three tools to see which tool detects the most spyware. Though still in beta, Microsoft AntiSpyware does an amazing job at detecting spyware by finding twice as many infected files as Ad-Aware and nearly three times as SpyBot."
Microsoft knows what holes they have in the OS better than anyone else. They just don't bother to fix them in a timely fashion because it's not profitable The anti spyware isn't really a change in direction for them if you think about it. They are still applying a band-aid to the problems rather than a real fix.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
and apparently their detection of license keys has greatly improved... my key is invalid.
Anyone else have this problem using their obscure key of choice? SP2 installed fine a few months ago.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Amen to that.
Also, they bought Giant Antispyware, and christ on a crutch does that thing do a hell of a lot of false-positives.
I rennamed a textfile something like claria.exe and that thing started screaming immediately that bad people were trying to take over my life.
So seriously, I couldn't care less.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
I tried it. I found this particular interesting: Box: Compaq P4 2ghz 256mb memory XP SP1 on a Corp. net (yes I know, but some of our in-house apps fail under SP2): Fairly clean already machine with Adaware and Spybot already loaded. I downloaded the Microsoft beta and ran it. Many minutes later it reported a passle of stuff. Like with Adaware and Spybot I said "Ok dump it all" turned off the All time protection feature, said no to all the "Do you want me to be intrusive and make all your decisions for you?" typical Microsoft crap (didn't matter, it loaded itself anyway), then, and this is the curious part: I ran Spybot. It ran in 2 seconds flat. Say What? So I downloaded a NEW spybot and installed it. It then did a normal several minutes run and found a few chunks I said go ahead and dump. Does the M$ product consider Spybot....spyware?
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
I just attempted to install Microsoft AntiSpyware on a machine from which Internet Exploder had been mostly removed via the utility Win98 Lite. It refused to install, insisting upon the presence of Internet Exploder 6. The machine in question uses Mozilla, with which we're quite happy. It appears that Microsoft is tying yet another product to the use of Internet Exploder 6, probably in violation of the recent DoJ Consent Decree. Will the Bush Justice Department do anything?
Linux will succeed becuase you have many groups contributing to computing some free some not so free but it creates a economy around it of sorts.
Microsoft however cant stand for some reason to be the OS that great things are built on like Linux can and is being today. They try to take their OS and adapt and squeeze out what they consider competition. Then they take the products that other companies make to run on Windows such a Ad-Aware, Norton Antivirus, Lotus Notes and a myriad of other programs out there and try to build them into Windows. Netscape employeed people who designed, maintained, and supported their browser. Microsoft rolled out IE and tied it into their OS sparking a controversy that eventually landed it in court. Yes the consumer has suffered but what about those Netscape employees? Did Microsoft give them jobs making IE better and supporting it? Hardly those guys were muscled out of the marketplace. Now I'm sure they got jobs elsewhere but what and where are they doing things.
This can go for any number of companies that are threatened becuase Microsoft refuses to make windows as good and secure as it can be they only want to add the next cool feature into their OS.
Symantec, Mcaffee, Real, and many other companies employ many good people with ideas and not just the engineers and software hackers, there are secretaries, janitors, and guards that also are employeed and probably buy Windows. Once they lose their jobs becuase Microsoft muscled their company out of business then they probably wont be buying as many computer products anymore.
Thus Microsoft sits there and kills their own bottom lines.
Of course were all eventually damned in that robots and smart computers will replace our jobs. Just look at those poor bastards that are being replaced in the Toyota autoplants here soon. This will spread to all auto makers across the world and it will not stop there. Productivity increases due to these robots will put strain initally on supply lines becusae those humans cant keep up and then one company will pick up the slack by having robots do that portion of the work and other companies will have to do so to keep up.
From there it's basically a self feeding reaction that eventually will nullify every job we have or can move to in the next 50-100 years.
Oh and governments would step up to help you?
In any case, I uncheked the "install real time protection agents" option during installation, but after running the scan I ran through the options to see what other features it had. Surprise, RTP was enabled. Oh the irony of MS AntiSpyware behaving in the same shady fashion as Spyware apps. ;)
So if you do install it but don't want the RTP agents, make sure you hit up the options before quitting.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Whether you think the anti-trust case was a good idea or a bad one, you have to concede that Microsoft might well have been broken up by now if Al Gore had won the election. Pointing out that fact doesn't make me a partisan.
Again, your memory needs refreshing. MS's dominance of the OS market is pretty much an accident. That actually got into the business against their own will. They wanted to sell development tools for the new IBM PC, but that meant that IBM had to adopt an OS those tools would run on. Which is why they steered IBM to CP/M. When that fell through, they hurriedly licensed a CP/M clone from Seattle Computer Products, which became the basis for MS-DOS.MS-DOS is one of the biggest abortions since the rise of modern technologies (find me a single OS expert who will give it high marks). Yet its very flaws created such a high level of lockin with the PC platform itself -- which was also pretty flawed. Since compatibility soon became the name of the game, clone computers had to reproduce all of IBMs mistakes. And since their biggest mistake was choosing MS-DOS, computer makers ended up paying a tithe to Bill for every box they sold.
But even if you were correct, and Bill achieved his success by technical brilliance and plain good business -- so what? He got his reward when he became the richest dude on the planet. He did not earn the right to destroy the very marketplace that made him rich. Microsoft's role in the current marketplace is bad for all of us -- including Microsoft. Calling me ideological names isn't going to change that.
It also felt the need to alter my hosts file for me. It didn't like the fact that I had "ads.msn.com" pointing to 127.0.0.1 (as well as over 100 other ad domains; the only one it cared about was MSN!)
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
I stopped using SpyBot & Adaware a long time ago.
They're most admirable projects, however, neither are comprehensive.
Often times, you have to run both to try to remove something, and there is still spyware installed.
Neither offers a preemptive system either (filtering web, watching the registry etc)
The *most* comprehensive program I have found is webroot SpySweeper.
It is incredibly thorough, has staff dedicated to finding new spyware strains, the ability to report suspicious files, the works.