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Norton Users Worried By PIFTS.exe, Stonewalling By Symantec
An anonymous reader writes that "[Monday] evening, on systems with Norton Internet Protection running, users began to see a popup warning about an executable named PIFTS.exe trying to access the internet. The file was shown to be located in a non-existent folder inside the Symantec LiveUpdate folder. There were several posts about this to the Norton customer forums asking for help or information on this mysterious program. The initial thread received several thousand views and several pages of replies in a few short hours before being deleted. Several subsequent posts to the Norton forum were deleted much more quickly. These actions — whether actively covering up, or simply not well thought through — have spurred people to begin crafting conspiracy theories about the purposes of this PIFTS program. I for one am blocking the program until more information becomes available." The current top link on Google for "PIFTS.exe" links to one of these deleted questions on Norton's support boards, which sounds innocent enough: "I searched this forum but did not see PIFTS.exe. Any idea what this is?"
Well done... you've switched from the 2nd worst anti virus scanner, to possibly the WORST antivirus scanner. I just hope to God it isn't the free version which is worse than useless. AVG has the worst detection rate of any AV product.
Why don't people read reviews before buying software? I won't post any links to specific reviews, because someone will say I've cherry picked the source of the review, so just google it. I think you'll find that AVG (especially the free edition) usually comes LAST and things like NOD32 and Kapersky usually come out top (of these two, I personally prefer NOD32 as it seems to have an extremely low impact on system performance).
I don't mind people making mistakes - nobody's perfect - but I do object to censorship. Norton's removal of posts from the forum is indicative of the "dictator" mindset - rather than admit an error happened, they prefer to silence people's voices. I consider that a human rights violation and that is never acceptable.
I think a DOS Attack against community.norton.com would be entirely appropriate. Punish them for their free speech abuses.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall