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Symantec Competing Unfairly Against Spybot?
frankbaird writes "Symantec has been claiming for months that the anti-spyware program Spybot-Search & Destroy corrupts Norton Ghost images. Spybot has tried to convince them this is a false positive. After having been ignored, and this is the second time Symantec has claimed a false positive against Spybot, the makers of Spybot have gone public. They claim that rather than compete fairly with quality products, Symantec is resorting to libel."
Symantec asserts that SpyBot is corrupting Norton Ghost images - well, is it, or isn't it?
I mean, this isn't like determining the existence of god is it? The image is either corrupt, or it is not. So which is it?
Anyone?
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
But...But...But Symantec is part of the Anti-Spyware Coalition. They would never lie about something like this...
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Or an example of really clever free press.
I can't help but think that no matter which way this goes, Spybot is the one clearly coming out ahead; they'll loose some enterprise business if they really are corrupting Ghost images, but otherwise, a lot of people will hear about 'em. If Symantec was engaged in libel, then there is a whole David vs. Golliath thing going on. If Spybot was making up the whole thing, everyone grumbles a bit, but a lot of people checked out their website and/or decided to give the software a try.
All of which will make proving damages in court rather...interesting :-)
Please help metamoderate.
One of the first things I do for any system in distress is REMOVE Symantec. Of course, it's a pain since they are like a plague. They infest the registry like lice and do not remove themselves when you run their deinstallation tool. Bottom line, they are big, but they hogs.
Sysmantec can whine, but no one who knows anything is listening or buying.
I donate to Spybot and promote McAfee.
ay
We've been deploying images with Ghost 8, AV 8, 9, and now 10 with SpyBot for at least a year and a half now and have never had any problems.
I know, I know, anecdotal evidence and all that, but still we've never had a corrupt ghost image in all that time.
Are Symantec trying to tell us 'Dont use Spybot' or 'Use dd instead of Ghost'?.. Out of Ghost and Spybot I know which I consider more disposeable.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Everything is possible, but if Symantec had reasonably good processes in place they should have been able to provide the orginal reasons and symptoms that caused them to write that knowledgebase article, however incomplete, along with "we will investigate this matter further"
A week should be sufficient time to pop down to see the developers, ask them to look up in the version control system who added this detection rule and why, and to even chat with that particular programmer. This should give Symantec's representative plenty enough detail to provide a competent reply to Spybot, but for some reason they haven't done so.
In my opinion, anyone who has been attentive to the computer industry in the last 8 years has seen plenty of evidence that Symantec is to be avoided. Such a person would have seen the amazing number of serious bug reports. Often Symantec is even worse than Microsoft in attentiveness, and that is extreme.
We stopped using Symantec software, other than to buy copies and test them, many years ago when a Symantec technical support representative cheerfully explained that the very misleading operating system error message we were getting was due to Symantec software being corrrupted by another program. The other program? Symantec WinFax Pro.
In recent years, Symantec technical support has been very angry and adversarial. It is not difficult to guess that things are not going well inside the company.
My experience is that Symantec has a high percentage of employees who know almost nothing about technical things. Such employees are cheaper to hire; I imagine that is the reason.
It's interesting that the few posts here that say they've had no problems with Ghost/Spybot have been using Ghost 8. As I mentioned in another post, Ghost 9 and 10 are repackaged versions of Drive Image, which were obtained from PowerQuest. They have nothing to do with prior versions of Ghost except for the name. Does anyone here have any experience with Ghost 9 or 10 and Spybot?
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I tell you what, remove your Symantec Ghost and use a better and free (as in beer and speech) product called QtParted.
You are kidding, right? It has been years since Norton Utilities did anything useful. The AV scanner and firewall let far too much through, and everything else they install is useless... The spyware scanner is a sieve used as an umbrella, the system cleanup utilities was useful on 98 but now just call software that comes with XP, crash protection takes a ton of resources and never works when you need it to, uninstall is about as successful as the regular windows uninstall routines, etc.
The only really good utilities are premium and expensive anyway, Partition Magic and Ghost. The average user will never need these, which is fortunate as the average user never buys these.
For Antivirus, use AVG. It is solid, low-resource, and free, and people have been using it successfully for many, many years. For a firewall, you want either Kerio Personal Firewall or Zone Alarm. Either is a small, robust, and far more secure than Norton firewall. Kerio is a little more powerful, Zone Alarm is a little simpler. Both are free, and have been around for years.
No antispyware software (especially commercial applications) catches everything, so a cocktail is usually in order. The two I recommend are Ad-Aware and Spybot. They're both classics, they both take low resources and are easy to schedule, and they have different search methodologies and as such catch different types of spyware. They also don't run unless called, so they don't take up any system resources. Combined, the two catch just about everything.
I have heard good things about Counter-Spy, but with just an 85% catch rate, it is still good to run a second application along with it. Likewise, with a 20 dollar yearly service fee, it isn't "fire and forget," and I've seen far too many systems that were unprotected because the credit card on file with their software service company expired.
Take all of the above utilities. Put them on a disk. Write a very small shell script that automatically launches the installers on insertion of the disk and clicks through everything (try PTFB, which can be launched and run from the disk automatically) and adds scheduled tasks to run the software. This shouldn't take you too long. Then whenever a crapflooded machine comes into your office with an expired copy of Norton, just clean it up and pop in the disk. I can't tell you how many machines I've installed AVG, Kerio, Ad-aware, Spybot (or some variant thereof) on, and have never regretted it.
There is a lot better stuff out there. Surprisingly, a lot of it is free. And while people seem to like to pay for software because it gives them a false sense of security, they also like the fact that you can whip out a disk right there and be done in five minutes, hassle-free.
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