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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?"
Is people still seriously running anything Norton or Symantec in their computer as means of "protection"?
I thought it was common knowledge that their "programs" are complete and utter crap.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
> Can you post a link to back up your argument?
Yes, but I won't for the reason I already said.
I HATE the fact that AVG incorporates something called LinkScanner which scans websites you've not even visited yet for potential threats. The side effects of this are that it messes up your web stats and causes fake 'clicks' on pay per click adverts! This practice should be illegal in my opinion. On one particular day, I noticed that AVG LinkScanner was causing 96% of the traffic to my webserver but I had no way of blocking it as it uses a standard user-agent string. AVG have apparently partially removed this feature now thankfully, but I still wouldn't touch their product with a barge-pole. The only thing in their favour, is that when I rang them up to tell them about the linkscanner problem, a human answered straight away and they seemed genuinely concerned and were quite proactive at trying to help me alleviate the symptoms on my webserver.
Someone also brought me a computer to fix which had 8 separate pieces of spyware and two viruses on it. The computer was running AVG Free Edition 8.0 and was fully up to date. With this experience, I don't need a review and pretty pictures to tell me AVG is shit thanks...