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McAfee Anti-Virus Causes Widespread File Damage
AJ Mexico writes, "[Friday] McAfee released an anti-virus update that contained an anomaly in the DAT file that caused many important files to be deleted from affected systems.
At my company, tens of thousands of files were deleted from dozens of servers and around 2000 user machines. Affected applications included MS Office, and products from IBM (Rational), GreenHills, MS Office, Ansys, Adobe, Autocad, Hyperion, Win MPM, MS Shared, MapInfo, Macromedia, MySQL, CA, Cold Fusion, ATI, FTP Voyager, Visual Studio, PTC, ADS, FEMAP, STAT, Rational.Apparently the DAT file targeted mostly, if not exclusively, DLLs and EXE files." An anonymous reader added, "Already, the SANS Internet Storm Center received a number of notes from distressed sysadmins reporting thousands of deleted or quarantined files. McAfee in response released advice to restore the files. Users who configured McAfee to delete files are left with using backups (we all got good backups... or?) or System restore."
Why should a fsck like this surprise anyone? I just purchased a high quality surgical stainless steel 8" caliper on the weekend. Its a vernier - imperial and metric.
On the imperial scale there are five (5) subdivisions between 0 and 0.1", four (4) subdivisions between 0.1-0.2, 0.2-0.3, 0.3-0.4 and THREE (3) between 0.4-0.5
This manufacturer has gone to the trouble of setting up a full assembly line to machine calipers. They spend probably over $100,000 on the injection mold for the plastic case probably.
Then after all this they hire a person to mark the damn thing who cannot count to 4 and it passed QA and all the distribution people including the retailer who sold it to me.
Should I presume the marks on the damn thing are in the right place?
hahahahahaha
Well - they do actually seem to be in the right place but it sure is funny that they were too incompetant to get the labling right after spending probably at least several million on an assembly line and tooling to manufacture calipers. They even went to the effort of using a laser to ingrave a serial number on it.
There's gotta be a way to blame this on Bush. Somehow he was responsible.
No problem. Bush was elected, then suddenly all the anti-trust remedies against MS were gutted. MS was not broken up into several competing companies and thus had no motivation to create a better product to compete against the other "baby-MS's." Since they had no such motivation they did not release a new version of their OS that was fairly secure by default and they did not sell it at a competitively low price. As a result more companies and individuals had to buy anti-virus add ons and were thus burned by this malfunction. See, that wasn't too hard.
I mean, yes, you're lazy, but damn, man, it's just Google.
My point was that I don't use any computers that need such a thing or to my knowledge, there are even subscription offerings for anti-virus subscriptions.
Currently, I run OS X, Linux, and Solaris, and I have never known anybody that has needed an anti-virus subscription for them.
Am I missing out on the fun?