Microsoft Anti-Spyware Removes Norton Anti-Virus

An anonymous reader writes "According to a story over at Washingtonpost.com, the latest definitions file for Microsoft's Anti-Spyware beta flags Symantec's Norton Antivirus products as a password-stealing trojan and prompts users to delete portions of the program. Users who follow the instructions hose their installation of Norton, requiring delicate Windows registry edits and a complete removal/reinstall of Norton. Microsoft's support forum is quickly filling up with complaints about this problem, many from businesses that have been pretty hard hit. This should be a cautionary tale about deploying beta products in production environments."

Comments

ask yourself WHY WE EVEN NEED anti-* software!!

[catmistake]

Don't forget that if Windows worked properly, you wouldn't even need anti-virus / anti-spyware! So their intention is to profit off their own inadequacies?!?!! Unfuckingbelievable. And the beta testers just playing right along... la la la... This is akin to hiring someone who is incompetant, incapable of completing a job due to being a complete screw up... and they then demand a raise because they to have to work the double duty of correcting their own screw ups... wtf? How is Microsoft even getting away with this??!!! Windows should have a mandatory product recall, just like cars... if it doesn't do what it's supposed to do... its broken. Send the stinking thing back.

Beta and the Microsoft Product Lifecycle.

[twitter]

It's always beta. I'd imagine that each definition file gets some testing, but not the same amount as a new software product.

My thought is that this is the beginning of the usual Microsoft offensive into new territory on their platform. You only have to look back at the way they eliminated DRDOS, back up software, Lotus, Word Perfect, Netscape and other media players to see the pattern. The hapless user sees their favorite program performance degrade and they are soon left fighting Microsoft preference changes or giving in to use the inferior Microsoft program. Other anti-competitive tricks abound as well. Try finding a free beer CD writer with ISO capability. Try the default defrag tool sometime, it takes all night to run and blows up half the time, but resizing a NTFS partition without first doing a defrag is risky. The death of Norton, Symantic and others was announced years ago when Microsoft decided that AV/Security, aka fixing their own bugs, was a profit center. So, I agree, this is not really a beta issue.

Still, this is a good time to compare the Microsoft and free distribution method lifecycles. Debian is a good example of a GNU/Linux distribution and I'll compare that to Microsoft from a user's perspective.

Debian is consistent, easy and the user is well taken care of. Code is selected in the experimental branch, tested in the testing branch and maintained in stable. The experimental branch is as good or better than most commercial software ever is. Testing is usually better and stable is like a rock. In binary form, you can still download older stable distributions, which include thousands of programs to do just about anything you want. While there are many distributions specialized to older and more limited hardware, you can pick up an older release and it will work as well as it ever did. Because of a lack of co-operation by hardware and software vendors, free software has been more difficult to install but once it's there it's stable and never goes away.

In the Windows world, the user is on their own and compatibility issues abound. Windows itself is a minimal distribution of software which does not include even the basics, such as virtual desktops or a spell checker. To get a functional system, you have to go to dozens of vendors. Individual companies write software for various versions of Windows, but it's impossible to tune it to all of them, so performance is hit and miss. Even when things do work, they might not work together, thanks to DLL hell and constant M$ "updates" which never seem to improve the system's 12 minute half life. Much like free software, Microsoft and other companies reuse and improve their code base. Unlike free software, they are unable and unwilling to co-operate. The life cycle there goes something like this:

1. Beta - a reward for the elite of the community. Beta software often includes features unavailable to ordinary users, and distributed free of charge. It may not be as stable as production software.
2. Production - The multihundred dollar thing monopoly distributed by the likes of Dell. Stability reaches it's peak, which is not very good. People using Microsoft often lose files to "data corruption" for reasons unheard of in the free software world.
3. End of Life. This starts the day the next "version" is released as beta software. Commercial software writers target the beta version and things get buggier and buggier for those who don't move along. Official end of life is announced by Microsoft themselves as an end of service packs and updates, but the real end is years earlier.
4. The after life. People continue to install their original software long after the end of life because it's the only way they have to run hardware with non free drivers and non free binaries they were sold.

While you might be able to get a system that works with itself from Dell, keeping it up is a nightmare. If any one of the twelve or so vendors changes things so that they don't wor

Re:What problem?

[ultranova]

And besides, what kind of antivirus system lets some random program delete it's files, causing it to stop protecting the user's machine?

It isn't "some random program", it is a Microsoft program, with free access to all the undocumented APIs in Windows - I'm sure that Microsoft left themselves loopholes all over the place. In fact I suspect that the majority of Windows security problems were deliberately put there to act as backdoor for Microsoft to do something like this.