Symantec Labels Vicars' Software as Spyware

ukhackster writes "The curse of Norton Antivirus has struck again. This time, Britain's vicars have been hit. Norton mistook a legitimate file for a piece of spyware, and those who followed the instructions found that their sermon-writing application no longer worked. Norton was once an essential application. Is it turning into a joke?"

Comments

once an essential application?

[yagu]

An anecdotal Norton lifetime experience:

At one time I considered Norton an essential application/utility because I couldn't explain sufficiently to new computer owners why Norton (and McAffee, etc.) were unnecessary, evil, and just wrong for them. So, I'd always get their credit card number, hold my nose, and ante up their money for their peace of mind.

But after years of being called back and finding computer disarray on these "happy" users caused directly or indirectly by the intrusive "anti-virus" software suites such as Norton, I've switched tactics and now the very first thing I do when working on others' computer (with their permission of course) is uninstall any of the mainstream virus protection programs, download AVG free version and am done with it.

I've found since taking this approach virtually no call backs where any problems were created by AVG, with much happier friends and family who have at the same time saved themselves a couple of bucks.

Once an essential application Norton? Only in as much as Norton had been able to (and continues to) convince the world they are essential, not a hard task in the FUD universe that is Windows.

Re:once an essential application?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Once an essential application Norton? Only in as much as Norton had been able to (and continues to) convince the world they are essential, not a hard task in the FUD universe that is Windows.

Man, is this the truth. My dad runs Norton and I told him once that I thought that Norton caused more problems than it solves, but he trusts (sigh) Norton. Long story short, just last night as a personal favor I went over to help a retired guy I know who was having trouble with his PC. He also runs Norton and it sucks! He has some crazy Norton program running to warn him about "unsafe" web pages. I was trying to help him with access problems to an online account he had and all this program did was pop up a box on every single account page saying that "This page is unrated." and making him check off one of three boxes (basically - continue, don't go there, go there this time only) AND then enter a password. This is a retired guy who is 73 years old. I can't imagine living like this where you have to click on a box and give a password just to surf the web, but that's how he lives. He doesn't even question the logic of this. I really don't know if he is maybe protecting the PC for his 5 year old granddaughter (why not just not let the kid use it?) or if he thinks it will save him from accidentally going to a "bad" site (he is very religious, by the way).

I feel pretty strongly that friends don't let friends use Norton. I work in IT and I don't know anybody in my field who uses Norton at home. I agree that AVG is better than Norton AV. The only Norton product I like is Ghost.

Antivirus

[DownWithTheMan]

I think on a corporate level, anti-virus is a *must*, you're dealing with 100s of millions of dollars in transactions and any downtime is money lost... For the tech-savvy home user though, I really don't think anti-virus is essential. I run an iMac with OSX 10.4.7, and an IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpad with Windows XP SP2 and all the latest updates and hot-fixes. I refuse to put anti-virus on it because I think it sucks up too many of my resources. Since switching from IE to Firefox (back in the 0.4 Fire phoenix days) I have no had 1 single issue of spyware, malware, or virus problems on my machine. I keep everything up-to-date and I know who, what, when, and where I'm downloading all my files from the internet. I'll be honest, I pirate plenty and still haven't had any problems... The more I see these anti-virus solutions, it seems that they are designed to keep dumb people from from doing dumb things...

Re:well... yes?

[DavidD_CA]

That's assuming you're lucky enough to uninstall it.

A client of mine had Norton 2003 on one of her machines and I attepted to get that sucker off so I could install Norton 2005. Hell no. Followed the crazy instructions on their website to the letter.

To this day, whenever they reboot the machine Norton 2003 asks them to register (which it then errors out on). Then Norton 2005 takes over.

(I would format the machine and reinstall, but there's a number of issues there that I won't get into, and the computer is only used a few hours a week.)

Re:well... yes?

[rizzo420]

true... i've seen too many cases where the uninstall doesn't work and you have to use their manual removal tool, which used to be a great standalone exe, but now it's a crappy activex webpage that takes even longer.