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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?"
Just switched from Norton to AVG this weekend. Pure coincidence. Honest. I had no advanced knowledge this was coming or anything. ;-)
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."
Stupid Users who use
Stupid Software like
Symantec Products deserve
Stupid problems like
This one.
Why are people still using Norton for anything? It's *absolute* 'fascist-bullshit-bloated-doesn't-let-you-uninstall-or-exit-the-app-easy' software.
Why am I *not* surprised at all .
STOP USING THEIR SOFTWARE and shit like this...simply won't happen.
Yeah, I've heard this argument many times.
If you take this to the ultimate conclusion, you're effectively saying that there's no such thing as "more secure" or "less secure", all systems are equally insecure, and how much they get rooted depends exclusively on the market share.
Excuse me, but bullshit. While of course market share has *some* effect, it's pretty easy to see that for instance Windows got much better over time. From Win9x, where the box could be rooted without even trying, we got to XP and Vista, which set up a firewall during the install, and should hold up perfectly fine behind a direct internet connection, so long the user doesn't do anything stupid.
Windows definitely got better. There's no reason why Linux can't be even better. And if there's a problem, we don't have to wait for a corporation to get off its ass and do something about it.
Yes. Freedom to express your opinion is innate human quality, and if Norton does not recognize that right within their organization or website, then they are no better than the North Korean government.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall