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Microsoft Begins anti-virus Software Development
An anonymous reader writes "From the article: Microsoft's announcement that it will enter the AV market next year, with initial trials starting next week, could be a sign of many things to come, says SecurityFocus's Kelly Martin. " Not unexpected, given their recent purchase.
I guess the most depressing aspect of this is that I put almost no credibility in most of the statements MS makes. If they are succesful then it will be a weak middling product that probably focuses on protecting MS OS's and applications exclusively, probably will interfere with everyone else's products and will most likely be several years and several releases late. On the other hand it will probably wind up being 'free' as in you don't have to pay for it directly but because it will be cancerously embedded in the OS it will help keep the price of MS products absurdly high. And last but not least, the list of security patches for the AV tool itself will be extensive. Plus you can figure that it will absolutely crash Firefox and Openoffice.
We're working on it. Right now Slash just uses MySQL's MyISAM FULLTEXT indexing, which is kinda 2001. It's a cheap solution that we've limped along with for quite a while. But we've rewritten our search code to be modular, anticipating a better solution that we can plug in, once we find one we like. Our top contenders right now are Lucene and Kinosearch.