Are AV False Positives Hurting You?

Gerald asks: "After the most recent Wireshark release a certain AV vendor's product started warning users that the installer contained adware. Since then, I've spent several hours verifying this isn't the case, trying to get the AV vendor to fix their stuff, and reassuring affected users that we do not ship adware with our product. Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated case. I've had to do this several times over the past few years, and each incident uses up time that could have been better spent elsewhere. It's even worse for other projects. If you produce software, have you ever suffered collateral damage from AV false positives?"

Comments

Re:Moo

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're serious (that is, not just making a margin joke after Fermat), then you're free to post the reply to your blog, summarize it to a paragraph that doesn't trip the lameness filter, and post the summary along with a link to your blog post.

Everyone knows you're not allowed to do that unless your blog has tons of advertisements and you give CmdrTaco a cut of the ad revenue. If you arrange that, then you'll get your summary quickly posted on Slashdot even if it's poorly written, short on facts, and even if dozens of better articles on the same topic were submitted.

Okay, okay. So I can't demonstrate that CmdrTaco receives a cut of the ad revenue from these lameass blog sites. But that the ones getting posted are poorly written and short on facts and favored over much better articles is very easy to observe.

Since I didn't try to make a joke out of this, I expect to be modded down. That's why I posted as AC, fuckers.