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The Netscaping of Symantec and McAfee
rs232 writes to mention a C|Net article about the uncertain future of the popular anti-virus software companies. "I mention Netscape because, if you believe Symantec and McAfee, a similar situation is about to unfold within the security industry. Microsoft, again recognizing late that it had failed to seize upon this thing called security, is now about to bundle its own security solutions within Windows Vista and further enforce new security policies that lock out some third-party security solutions altogether. Vendors Symantec and McAfee have looked into the future and realized that people may one day speak of them in the way that we now speak reverently of the early builds of Netscape."
Symantec's and McAffee's respective antivirus products are some of the buggiest software I've ever seen. The latest versions of both are awful memory hogs with questionable reliability and average detection rates. McAffee installs are widely known to 'go bad', resulting in cryptic error messages, failed updates, and vulnerable systems. There are threads upon threads in the Dell forums of users trying to ununstall McAffee off a brand new computer and failing.
As for Symantec, , I had a computer at work with a copy of Symantec Corporate AV 10.1 (the latest version) still installed after we chose to migrate away from it due to ever rising costs and poor support. I tried to uninstall it. The uninstaller crashed. Then, every time I tried to right click, it tried to reinstall itself. Yes, you read that right - Symantec's antivirus installs a handler that traps every right click within Explorer that runs a check to see if files are missing. After two hours on the phone with a Symantec rep who didn't know what they were talking about, I finally had it cleaned off the system.
What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that the original Netscape, while not perfect software, had the right vision behind it. Symantec and McAffee don't. Both companies have gone downhill, and I'm absolutely sure it's for reasons completely unrelated to Vista's new kernel.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
there are many paid engineers working for mozilla foundation, and before that, AOL kept a bunch of people on the payroll working on mozilla/netscape.
what changed was not the salary status of the developers, but the managment style guiding the devolopment.
What ? Me, worry ?
...symantec in particular brings a system to its knees. Realtime scanning is a great idea IF it doesn't render your computer unusable. For obvious reasons you are forced to used the latest version, which just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I've started dumping Symantec in favor of a daily clamwin scan. Not as good...but at least the computer is usable.
IF you can get realtime scanning that doesn't slow you down. Try out AVG sometime. When I first got it, there was so little impact I was sure it wasn't doing anything. So I went and grabbed a virus to test it. Immediately, AVG threw up a red flag.
The threat to Symantec isn't MS making Windows unvirusable, that's not possible (barring trusted computing), the threat is that there are new AV companies that make good, fast, cheap products that beat the crap out of symantec's offerings. AVG and Kaspersky are two excellent choices. Also I hear lots of good things about Bitdefender though it leads to bluescreens on my (and other's) system.
Many companies don't seem to be bitching. Sophos announced they'll have a Vista compatible version out a couple weeks before Vista (their current version even works with realtime scanning, it just can't update or interact with the desktop). AVG has apparently been working with Vista since Beta 2 (I haven't tried it) and the 7.5 version is listed as Vista ready. Kaspersky Labs says "From what we have seen of Vista, we cannot tell that Microsoft is blocking access to the core."
So it seems that whatever the problem that Symantec and Mcafee are having, it's not universal to virus scanners. Seems more like they are lazy and don't want to do any rewriting whereas their competitors are on the stick.
Do they? I thought they just bought out Atguard and bloated it all to hell and back like they did with Norton Utilities.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
An example of the "unspeakable things" is outbound email scanning, where they add a proxy layer on smtp transactions. Only one big problem: this breaks authenticated SMTP. The only fix is to disable it. Inbound scanning is even more pathetic, only supporting VERY few email clients, such as Outhouse and Outhouse Express due to the implementation.
But *nix IS more popular - just not in the home.
If a botnet creator could break in to Linux servers he most certainly would.
Millions of high powered servers with big fat net connections. The net would tremble in fear.
Instead they are forced to infect crappy home computers.