Microsoft Anti-Spyware to Be Free of Charge

fubar1971 writes "During his keynote speech at the at the RSA Security Conference Bill Gates announced that the MS antispyware will be offered for free. From his speech: 'We've looked hard at the nature of this problem, and made a decision that this anti-spyware capability will become something that's available at no additional charge for Windows users -- both the blocking capability, and the scanning and removal capabilities.' Additional information at Government Computer News." Update: 02/16 16:57 GMT by Z : Microsoft was previously considering charging extra for this service.

Comments

Watch for the Error.log file

[Cy Guy]

I've been running this on one of my XP boxes since it came out. Here are a couple of caveats:

• It creates (what I consider to be) an absurdly large error.log file, on mine it had reached nearly 1Gb in about a month. I have since created a read-only dummy version of the file so it can't write to it anymore and it hasn't seemed to affect the program.
• When installed while Admin it's installed for every user, which I guess you would want the blocking for every user, but not necessarily the scanning and program update features, - which leads to ...
• Running as Admin it doesn't find suspicious Registry Entries in other users' User Registries, which means you could be the admin on an infested machine and not know it - this is on an XP Home box, so perhaps it's different on XP Pro?
• Though called a beta, I haven't been able to find a way to report these bugs/flaws/'features' to MS.

Re:Watch for the Error.log file

[mzwaterski]

To report bugs/request features you could try the newsgroup that they have setup:

http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/defaul t.asp?ICP=spywareus

Enterprise WILL be Charged

[Anonymous Coward]

The Consumer version will be FREE. Enterprise/Corporate version is NOT. They only let out one side of the story, for PR effect, it worked. You missed the flipside, for Enterprises they will charge.

Re:It wasn't a big change...

[DarkMantle]

MSFT's solution to not be quite as good as third party offerings.

Perhaps you forget, this used to be a third party offering. And the reason MSFT bought them is they were the best at remeoving the spyware, and had the best detection methods.

I was using Giant Antispyware for a few months before MS bought them. And I've seen very few changes (maybe because the Giant Company developers are still working on it.)

Can you say "Libel"?

[abb3w]

Lavasoft has found a new way to make money. Aparrently Ad-Aware no longer removes WhenU spyware.

Lavasoft has put out something on that in their press release yesterday. The removal is not because of bribes, but because apparently WhenU no longer meets their threat threshold to be included in the spyware definitions database.