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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."
"Corrupt" is perhaps not the right word. Imperfect. For all images and vestiges of God are imperfect with respect to the divine exemplar. One can reason back from the image to get some idea of God, but never the full thing.
I'm sorry, what was the question?
Oh yeah, well, TFA claims that there's no evidence whatsoever that it corrupts Norton Ghost images, and that Symantec has refused to provide any. So maybe it is like determining the existence of God: it could be the case that SpyBot is corrupting Norton Ghost images, but until someone posts some evidence, you'll have to take that on faith from Symantec.
I routinely pull computer images (Ghost 8.0 Corporate Suite), but that I've seen, there has never been a problem with spybot corrupting the image files. Of the several hundred gigs of images that we have stored, only one has ever gotten corrupted, that I can recall. That one image was of a computer that was most certainly not running Spybot though.
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);
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.
Same here. Our ghost server at one time had spybot running with full immunity protection on it and we never had a problem. Also images with spybot in them ran ok once imaged. The only thing I could think of that symantec would be taking about is teatimer doing something wierd to block the ghost server from writing to the drive correctly, and that's a real long shot considering that teatimer needs user verification for just about everything it does.
This situation doesn't surprise me comming from Symantec however. I ditched them around NAV 2001 and never looked back, Especially when you could predict when the next antivirus version would come out because the previous version would "mysteriously" start having problems or crashing about a week before the next version release.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Nor I. I work in a small ISP's callcenter, with aorund 5 other people. Norton products are the bane of my goddamned existance. Half the time you have to disable outgoing email scanning or you just cannot send email, period. Timeout errors all the time. Not only that, try explaining to a customer that it's not your service that is down, but rather, their $200 antivirus program that isn't working properly. Not pretty.
If Norton Internet Security suspects that "something's funny" it will randomly turn off your connection. You can ping from DOS, but you can't surf via IP or Domain Names. The solution? First try turning off the Norton Firewall, if that doesn't work, try uninstalling Norton. Reinstalling TCP/IP or Winsock doesn't even help.
I really cannot tell you how many times I've gotten a random "it doesn't work" call, only to find out that they have Norton and it's causing problems. It's my first question now when someone is having oddball problems with email or DNS errors. "Ah, I see. Do you have Norton on your system by any chance?"
It is important to note that the problems only started in 2003, previous versions of Norton products were fine. In addition Symantec has posted a security warning About their own products. Seems the latest version of their product uses the same trick that Sony's rootkit used.
Oh, and did I also mention that NIS destroys Secure website access even after uninstalling it, unless you fix it by digging through it's options?
If you want a good antivirus, I suggest AVG or Avast. Both are excellent free products that are nowhere near as invasive as Norton.
Indeed, it is the other way around.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.