Slashdot Mirror
AVG Backs Down From Flooding the Internet
Simon Wright writes "As a website that is featured heavily in many Google Australia search results, Whirlpool (Australia's largest technology forum) has been particularly affected by AVG's LinkScanner. We've seen a traffic increase as much as 12 hits per second from these bots. So we've actively and loudly campaigned against this move by AVG, encouraging all users of AVG 8.0 to uninstall the product. The discussion starts here. And AVG's backing down is posted here."
From that URL:"'As promised, I am letting you know that the latest update for AVG Free edition has addressed and rectified the issue that [Whirlpool] have brought to our attention. This update has now been released to users and has also been built into the latest installation package for AVG Free.' — Peter Cameron, Managing Director, AVG Australia."
I was looking at alternatives to AVG because of this. Good to know I don't have to keep looking.
I fail to see what Grisoft ever thought LinkScanner would acheive above the scanners that are becoming common in competing products that simply intercept http and pop3 traffic as it comes over the network. To me it seemed unnecessary to actually fetch every single search result. It also would obviously interfere with web analytics, and is potentially a security risk to people using AVG, not in terms of desktop security, but in terms of your real-life personal security. For example, I recall a recent article where the FBI had arrested people merely for clicking links to a porn site they had set up. Are you really safe from such operations and the general tendency of Government agencies to monitor activity these days when your computer is in effect programmed to click links for you?
I don't see information at the links in the summary of what changes were actually made to AVG now. Does anyone have details?
The site complains to AVG that its load has increased, so in response in gets a /.ing. Nice!
Anyway, the statement that "We've seen a traffic increase as much as 12 hits per second" is meaningless without knowing the overall traffic levels - for example, is +12/sec an increase of 100%, or an increase of 1%?. It's referred to as a "significant drain" on resources, but quoting one number without the other is pointless.
I use AVG... and was watching this.
I'm sure they thought it was a good idea, and sometimes good companies make bad moves.... I got AVG because leo laporte reccomended it, and dammit, i like leo.
But things change over time... is AVG still a good free AVG prog? And I dont mean just because of this controversy, they made good on it and responded. I mean the long haul.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
See: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1007329&p=13#r256
The fix has been independently tested.
Cheers WTW
I had already disabled LinkScanner.
I followed instructions as posted recently here to remove LinkScanner: this resulted in a re-install of AVG (without LinkScanner). The first update this re-install wanted was LinkScanner plus plugins, there was no way I could cancel and just get virus definitions, no point in continuing.
I have installed Clam. Now I can scan what I want when I want.
Users of Zeus Technology's ZXTM could use the following TrafficScript rule to protect themselves from AVG's DDoS attacks:
if( http.getHeader("Accept-Encoding") == "" &&
http.getHeader("Referer") == "" )
{
$ua = http.getHeader("User-Agent");
if( $ua == "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"||
$ua == "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)"||
$ua == "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"||
$ua == "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)" )
{
connection.discard();
}
}
Thing about Whirlpool is that it's a custom CF package developed by the webmaster and it's a thing of beauty. The ugly thing about is that it's hosted on WebCentral.
WebCentral... Whirlpool doesn't have to pay any money to WebCentral, they host it for free. The funky thing is that almost nobody on Whirlpool ever recommends WebCentral for webhosting. They recommend all sorts of other companies in Australia, except probably the most vocal one, WebCentral.
The reason? I've got customers that have PHP and ASP websites with WebCentral and pay $40 a month for a massive 200 MB of storage and 1 GB of transfers. Which is nothing these days. And for that amount of money, you'd think that the sites would at least be quick... think again. They are slow because WebCentral really don't know what they are doing. They've only got IIS and the first access to a website always takes ages for the DLL of the virtual site to start up and do its stuff. All the subsequent accesses are pretty quick. 12 accesses per second for the biggest techie forum in Australia shouldn't be all that much extra and certainly shouldn't bring the server to its knees. Search on Whirlpool hasn't been working most of the time because WebCentral's servers just won't take it. Full-text search will never exist, not as long as it's on WebCentral anyways.
WebCentral got bought out, not too long ago, by MelbourneIT, a registrar for .au domains, so you'd think that WebCentral had a clue when it came to DNS. They don't. I asked them to set up a new subdomain with a different IP address? What do they do? The redirect mail.something.com.au to point to the new IP address, with the hilarious consequence of a dozen people not being able to get any emails for a few days.
And then there's the case of the $65 for 2 year domain registration. You'd think that would include DNS hosting, as asiaregistry.com do for $30 for 2 years. MelbourneIT offers a 1-page website for $140 for 2 years. Well, think again. The $65 only cover domain reservation. It means that you register a domain, pay them money, but that's it. They sell you a product that's more than twice as expensive than with a reasonable competitor, but you can't actually do anything with it. No, what you want is 'Domain Parking', there's no way to get DNS hosting apart from that. $240 for 2 years. We've had domain names with AsiaRegistry for years now, and they've been absolutely reliable, more so than WebCentral will ever be.
I called them about that, they say that the advantage is them being a local business. That's the entire argument. A local business with shit webhosting and crap value. Don't ever do business with WebCentral.
There's no way I'd ever post this on Whirlpool, because it'd get removed by WebCentral, one way or another, immediately. And there's no way you'll see Simon Wright responding to me, it's like everything is open for discussion on Whirlpool as long as it's on topic, except WebCentral. They do provide hosting for free and can make Simon's life a bit uncomfortable at least if WebCentral is all of a sudden open for discussion.
... contains some kind of overflow bug? I guess hundreds of thousands of AVG equiped PCs will get infected instantly?
A programm that fetches each and every link it comes across *can't* be a very good idea. Certainly a feature invented by people without a security mindset?
One could always just turn the link scanner off. It requires the clicking of a button, if thats not to hard?
The problem is no so much the consumer experience... (although consumers experience was changed significantly as web searching became a lot more resource intensive).
The problem is that the link scanning featured caused a great deal of traffic to sites - even sites that consumers did not visit. That's not cool.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Bad ideas like this one seem to have a life if their own in marketing departments.
That's a good one, but there's also this suggestion from TFA:
. A company in the business that AVG is in should have seen this coming, what makes you think more of the same "quality" is not in the future?
No, I certainly won't be looking. There are just a handful of companies which *listen* to its customers. There fewer that listen to the users of their product which use it for free.
AVG shown that at least they do listen to their users, and are likely to rectify when they screw up. Similar to what happened with Netflix.
A bad company is not one which makes wrong choices, we all make wrong choices. But when the company is not able to acknowledge their errors and rectify, is when you should start looking for someone else to make business with.
I use AVG Free and recommend it to all the people who come to ask me for an Antivirus. The truth (in my opinion) is that such a thing should be provided with Microsoft Windows for free, after all it is the fault of their crappy Operating System that the computers get all infected.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
It would be quite convenient if one could just piss in any doorway when the need arose. We don't do it (most of us) because it is antisocial.
Accessing every webpage you see a link to multiplies the bandwidth you use by at least an order of magnitude.
This is what I'm switching to:
http://www.moonsecure.com/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They weren't an optional part of the install unless you used avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
As far as I could tell even selecting custom installation in the default didn't give you an easy way to disable link scanner. Disabling it from the AVG menu didn't actually stop link scanner from loading and running in the background. It also had the side affect of putting up a warning icon and a messages that said your computer may be unsafe or some such nonsense.
In this case I think a bit of condemnation towards AVG was richly deserved and hardly a knee jerk reaction. And actually they did try to crash the internet. That's what the uproar was all about.
Because the idea itself is flawed. Normally you visit only a minuscle part of the links your browser shows you. LinkScanner follows all of those links even when you never planned to visit them.
I actually bought AVG 8.0 (been using the free edition for years and felt guilty), then immediately uninstalled it.
The problem? Crashing my machine left and right. I could reliably crash winamp by opening small files, and other programs acted very very oddly.
Uninstalled, and the problems went away.
It could be a lot more than tenfold.
For example, the first link in Google for "wine" is for a program that lets you run windows software in other operating systems, and no 3 is the wikipedia entry about it. The rest of the links are about alcoholic drinks.
Most people outside of slashdot are going to be interested in the alcoholic drink links, but if they have AVG installed, they will be "visiting" winehq.org as well, even though they probably already have windows and the wine program will be completely useless for them.
Aside from the problem with increased traffic for webmasters to deal with, if someone had found an exploit for AVG, many systems might have been compromised without the user actively visiting the exploiting sites, making it worse in some ways than an iframe-based exploit. If all it effectively takes is for a link to appear in the page, that adds danger to what was just inconsiderate behavior.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.