Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft To Offer Free Anti-Virus Software
Dynamoo writes "The good news is that Microsoft have announced free anti-virus software for consumers, dubbed Morro, available late next year. The bad news is ... well, exactly the same. Although Microsoft's anti-malware products are pretty good, this move could drive many competitors out of business and create a dangerous security monoculture; major rivals will be lawyering up already. On the other hand, many malware infections could be prevented even by basic software. So is this going to be a good or bad thing overall?"
I've used both Avast and AVG freeware products with good results. Zero infections over the last couple of years.
As a consumer, it sure would be nice to have the OS actually ship with something that keeps the naughty people out, but there are a number of freely available alternatives already.
http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html
http://free.avg.com/
'course, if you use Linux then you can probably safely ignore the threat for now.
Cheers,
The antivirus market is, as everyone knows, the most FUD-filled part of the security industry. The effectiveness of different antivirus products is largely anecdotal, and shifts rapidly because of the arms race between virus writers and antivirus manufacturers. As it stands now, even "expert" end user cannot ascertain the relative effectiveness of the suites, and because antivirus products are still heuristics-based with a few "depacker" routines built in, they only catch the really obvious fish. (One funny thing with this is, if you pack an executable with a common yet relatively complicated packer, say "redeye", it'l get caught, but if you just jump in and jumble up the instructions with a debugger you can make it "invisible" easily). Because of this reliance on FUD to sell, and because there *is* already fierce competition in the antivirus market, maybe this won't change much, unless MS locks other vendors out somehow. Or will it be a different form of competition, because of the now-asymmetrical playing field? MS has an advantage in that they have access to the code and people who wrote the code, and designed the OS architecture.
It's free. If ANY other company (Apple, HP, anyone) decided they were going to release free antivirus software, anti-malware, blah blah blah, it'd probably be a good thing. MS does it and it can't be good, they're just fixing their own software, it is their own fault to begin with, etc. One would think we'd have gotten at least more creative at blasting MS.
On a more constructive note, it doesn't matter if MS ships it free with Windows. IE ships free with Windows, Safari ships free with Mac, Konqueror ships free, etc. The user that doesn't know any better to begin with is not going to go out and look for the best (out of 25) anti-virus and anti-malware solution possible. The user that doesn't know any better will use what Windows comes with. So what's wrong with MS providing free software with it's own product? Nobody seems to gripe about Konqueror being default in KDE, even though I presonally dislike it as a web browser.
Now, if they do other shady things like make it hard to uninstall, or whatever, that's different. But "free anti-virus software" and "shipped with Windows" in the same sentence doesn't mean we should get out a Gates-shaped guillotine.
They already DO sell antivirus software. Windows Live OneCare.
The reasons why antivirus software exists is because Microsoft software security uniformly sucks, almost all software for the platform is pathetically vulnerable to exploitation and people don't patch it - mostly because the patches themselves are often toxic and because the patching system is so archaic every program needs its own update monitor and installer, each with permission to update software on the box and each subject to its own vulnerabilities. People also don't patch because many of them are using pirated windows or other software and are leery of getting the WGA virus, so they don't patch and become a persistent blight on the global network.
Microsoft making an antivirus isn't going to solve any of these problems, and Microsoft making the quality of antivirus software that matches their anti-malicious software effort will make things worse. It will, however, drive yet another category of software partner out of business. It's good to have goals, I guess.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
cout >> "I have no patience to program anything useful and I hate having to write code";
You're right about this one, because you got the operator wrong: :)
cout << "I have no patience to program anything useful and I hate having to write code";
I guess I was wrong in the first place
Microsoft very heavily considered making Vista have a user-level account that required UAC to prompt for an admin account and password. Of course, you can set up your computer like that, but picking good defaults is something every programmer is aware of.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is all too well aware that picking the low-level user default means a lot more people would complain about their computers being 'broken,' because of the following reasons: ...
1) Microsoft had not fully transitioned its own services and utilities to use UAC tokens well, which results in multiple dialogs when trying to perform a single action on a protected file in a protected folder. Technically it's multiple actions, but they didn't make any way for a UAC token to apply to multiple events like that. (I leave the reasoning behind that to the reader.)
2) ISVs had not, until this point, had to deal with any more than an insignificant fraction of the users running without admin access. Even in internet cafes, the default user is typically an administrator that has had certain privileges removed, because it's easier to start from admin and start taking things away than it is to start from a low level account and add all the myriad, complex ACLs that you need to make 99% of programs work flawlessly.
3)
4) Profit: by making Vista annoy users and developers sufficiently that fewer applications will need administrator to run. According to Microsoft's data from opt-in user information, there has been a marked drop in applications that request administrator rights, about 50%. That's -tremendous- news, and there is still a downward trend. Fixing the Microsoft default security settings over a series of OS releases makes the entire thing less expensive, and with all the flak Vista got, their decision to not add one more thing to the pile of bad things Vista does by default is the only sensible one.
Windows 7 fixes many unnecessary UAC prompts and allows you to set users to have different levels of prompting, and I would put money on Windows 8 using a default low rights user as the final step in the transition. Reply here if you want to set it up :)