AVG Update Breaks iTunes

nate_in_ME writes "After getting a positive from the AVG virus detector while playing music on iTunes just a few minutes ago, I did a bit of research. It appears that AVG has recently pushed an update to the virus definitions that flags every iPod/iTunes related file as being infected with the 'Small.BOG' trojan. Interestingly enough, AVG does not have any information on this particular virus in their virus encyclopedia. Discussion on the Apple forum is up to 4 pages and climbing. One user there had an interesting thought: 'Maybe Palm has some shares in AVG...MUAHAAAA!!' (on page 3)."

Comments

AVG is doing its job

[Norsefire]

Bad music is a virus.

It spreads like wildfire and everyone has it.

Re:AVG is doing its job

[Enderandrew]

My wife has New Kids on the Block CDs still. I'm terrified I'll catch something from her.

Re:AVG is doing its job

[davester666]

No, you're safe. I know from personal experience...I haven't caught anything from her yet.

Re:AVG is doing its job

[Anonymous Coward]

http://firefoxhtml5test.webs.com/

Re:AVG is doing its job

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahaha-wait a sec, what music do you listen to? I guarantee some good artists who write genre are on iTunes.

Re:AVG is doing its job

[Ilgaz]

If you listen to current top 40, New Kids On The Block may sound somehow good to you. Trust me, tune into some top 40 radio/site, have patience for 1 hour and put that NKOB CD.

As I mention that, never run goodly coded MS-DOS antiviruses like F-Prot, TBAV under FreeDOS for nostalgic purposes. I don't remember any false positive of F-Prot for example. Remember the frequency of the users database updates. Like... Never? The stuff they were looking for weren't some lame Visual Studio gigantic code to. They were amazingly written ASM code which does amazing tricks to hide themselves thanks to the direct access of hardware. Now, a daily updated AV with millions of dollars in hand can easily detect part of World's number 1 music player as a trojan and we all say "Oh well, they fixed it..."

Not well, really...

Re:AVG is doing its job

[Anonymous Coward]

best your wife/girlfriend related reply ever.

Re:AVG is doing its job

[Midnight Thunder]

No, you're safe. I know from personal experience...I haven't caught anything from her yet.

I take it your sudden taste in Celine Dion is unrelated?

Re:AVG is doing its job

[OnlyPostsWhilstDrunk]

Herpes is localized. Remember that time you passed out at the party? Well I've been to the doctor and well... friendly suggestion.. have your butt checked.

Re:AVG is doing its job

[Briareos]

More like "bad software is a virus" - have you looked at iTunes on a Windows system? Yeeech... >_<

np: Orbital - The Naked And The Dead (2Orbital (Disc 2))

Re:AVG is doing its job

[petermgreen]

There are two issues.

Firstly in the old days we were dealing with a few bored or occasionally vengefull people. Now we are dealing with massive organised crime. They can easilly afford to buy every antivirus product on the market and spend all the time they need to tweak a virus until it no longer gets detected or research new ways to make life harder for the antivirus vendors.

Secondly there is a constant arms race, the viruses are trying to find new ways to hide and the scanner vendors are trying to find ways to fight back against that hiding. The end result is that both sides

Re:AVG is doing its job

[petermgreen]

They abandoned drm on newly sold music. Existing music still has it unless the user pays an upgrade fee (and worse upgrading is all or nothing) and afaict they still have it on music that is given away as part of various promotions and on all thier video content..

Re:AVG is doing its job

[Anonymous Coward]

Good call

Re:AVG is doing its job

[Anonymous Coward]

Upgrading is no longer all or nothing. You can cherry pick individual songs to upgrade at $0.30 apiece. Everything else you said appears to be true.

Update

[nate_in_ME]

I actually submitted this yesterday...updates in the Apple discussion thread make it sound like everything is back to normal.

Re:Update

[Runaway1956]

iTunes - - - normal - - - iTunes - - - normal

I just don't get the connection.

Re:Update

[saxoholic]

Yeah, AVG had a false positive on friday, several users submitted false positive reports, and the updated virus definitions yesterday fixed the problem. Nothing to see here, move along.

Conspiracy!

[girlintraining]

It's a conspiracy! Or... maybe it's just that the definition for the virus in question was rushed out the door without adequate testing. How many new viruses are reported each week again? They probably don't "beta test" their definitions, and just do it in a lab. Oops. The lab machines didn't have iTunes.

Re:Conspiracy!

[FourthAge]

A/V company in "mistake" shock, Film at 11. There have been many instances of false positives from antivirus software.

Although in this case, it's not a false positive. iTunes really is a virus, along with all Apple products. I don't think I'm infected. But I love Apple products and must buy more of them. Mmm, that iPhone certainly looks like a great deal. Oh yeah, I'd certainly sell my soul to buy one of those. And the new MacBook, gotta have it. Powered by BSD you know, bit like Linux except not free, in fact quite expensive. Get a Mac, get a Mac, get a Mac.

Re:Conspiracy!

[Ihmhi]

I wonder if lab machines are just like, fresh Windows/OSX installs or if they have real-world-use programs that many people have, like AIM, iTunes, etc.

Re:Conspiracy!

[dov_0]

AVG breaking something? Shock horror! It's normally Symantec that does that...

Re:Conspiracy!

[ILuvRamen]

Or maybe you're half right and it's both. Maybe someone submitted bad info on purpose cuz they hate Apple with a passion (come on, you know they're out there!) and AVG rushed the definitions into an update, just kinda taking their word for it.

Re:Conspiracy!

[makomk]

Perhaps. iTunes also uses a bunch of highly obfuscated code with anti-reverse engineering protections, which probably increases its odds of being detected as suspicious.

Had This Problem Myself

[Jucius Maximus]

It does not appear to flag "every" file related to iTunes, it is just the iTunesMiniPlayer.dll.

The workaround is to disable the real-time scanner.

However their latest update had fixed it, and my real-time scanner is running again without problem.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[nate_in_ME]

I'd heard mixed reports on this one...with iTunes running already, I was only getting the error in itunesregistry.dll. However, when I shut down and restarted iTunes, I had about 200 warnings in a matter of seconds...

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[Sponge Bath]

"The workaround is to disable the real-time scanner."

Or switch to a better AV product. For a while I was satisfied with AVG, but gave up after other false positive problems with it. Avira does a better job (check out http://www.av-comparatives.org/) and still has a free version.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[olsmeister]

Avira is good, and is the software that I use on one of my machines. However, it does have an annoying nag screen showing an advertisement that pops up everytime it does a definition update. I never had that with AVG Free.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[Todrael]

Interestingly, Windows 7 asked me to upload this file along with a couple others for further analysis by Microsoft. Perhaps Windows Defender flagged it as well.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[Anonymous Coward]

Set the permissions to disallow your account to run avnotify.exe, and the problem goes away.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[Billhead]

I tried Avira on two computers two months ago, and on one it was constantly trying to access the floppy drive, and that seems to be a known problem.

I'm not going to bother installing it on my other computers to see if it works, I'm going with NOD32.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[kklein]

Or switch to a better AV product.

I loved AVG for a long time, but since 8, it has been a resource hog and has added a bunch of crap I don't want and keeps asking me if I'd like to pay and keeps throwing up false positives.

I just got rid of it the other day.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[Ilgaz]

It would be understandable if the file in question was equivalent Windows version of USBMux which is basically iPod driver as far as I understand.

It has everything to be suspected by a heuristics scan. First of all, it got recently updated (that Palm thing), must be encyripted, added into startup, must have interesting system calls dealing with the DRM enabled device etc.

The file you mention sounds like ordinary DLL. For a second, I was actually happy that AVG finally has some real heuristics to have false suspicions :)

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[halffull]

I recently switched away from AVG as well, but I tried Avast instead. No nag screens anywhere, and it's easy to get a very light install without any extras. No performance issues that I've noticed.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[Lehk228]

I find nag screens less annoying than the eating of application and or vital system files.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[Blakey Rat]

Excuse the stupid question, but it's not something easy to Google: is Avira the one that has annoying noises and talks to you? Someone recommended a great anti-virus package to me once, and it turned out to be the most irritating piece of software I've ever run.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[kevingolding2001]

I think you are talking about Avast.
When it detects a virus a big grey window opens up showing the biohazard symbol, you hear a siren, then a voice (sounding remarkably like Kitt) says "A virus has been detected".
Yes it is kind of annoying, but I still regard it as one of the better anti-virus programs.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[adolf]

I like Avast quite a bit. It's generally fast, problem-free, and stays the hell out of the way.

Or at least, it stays out of the way once you do a few things to it:

Tell it to turn off all sounds and notifications of normalcy. And to automatically accept all new program and definition updates. And to never to bother to ask to reboot the computer (it's a Windows desktop -- it'll be rebooted soon enough for othe reasons, anyway).

After that, it just sits quietly on the taskbar unless things go awry somehow.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[unfunk]

"The workaround is to disable the real-time scanner."

Or switch to a better AV product.

Or a better media player. iTunes on Windows is superior only to Quicktime on Windows. Both are (in terms of usability) inferior to... well, pretty much everything else.

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[toxygen01]

I loved AVG for a long time

How can someone actually *love* antivirus program? Something that slows down your work? Oo

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[King_TJ]

Umm, yeah -- because people who like to shop and buy from the iTunes music store have SUCH a vastly superior experience when they use other music players/indexers for Windows, right?

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[Dexter Herbivore]

If I hear my housemate's PC say "Virus Database has been updated!", one more time in that smug voice and accent... To the moon, Alice!

Re:Had This Problem Myself

[adah]

Or a better media player. iTunes on Windows is superior only to Quicktime on Windows. Both are (in terms of usability) inferior to... well, pretty much everything else.

Is Slashdot full of Apple haters? The parent post gives no evidence of why iTunes is inferior, but it got a (ridiculous) "insightful" rating.

I am a happy user of iTunes, since the time I became an iPod owner. iTunes simply gives the best experience when using an iPod. It is true that I did not try iTunes before buying the iPod, but I have kept using since that time. It is a bit slow and bloated, but it is good otherwise.

This is a problem with AV in general.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a AV vendor (not one of the big ones), and false positives are a big problem. Essentially there are two issues. First, how severe is the threat? You might skimp on your validation process in order to get something out sooner. Second (and much harder to resolve), there is effectively an infinite amount of software out there; on top of that, there may also be many different versions (iTunes 6, 7, 8, point releases, etc). You try to do the best you can, but shit happens because you can only test against so much software.

Re:This is a problem with AV in general.

[TheLink]

Just curious. How well would you guys do at detection if stuff like perl malware becomes common?

Would it the same, or harder?

I'm asking this because if stuff like OSX and Linux become more and more popular, they will become viable targets to convert to "zombies". And both OSX and Linux have a different set of built-ins for malware authors to take advantage of- e.g. scripting languages.

Haha, good

[ArchieBunker]

iTunes is about as useful as malware. If someone would only write a simple drag and drop app for the ipod touch that didn't require jailbreaking....

Seriously does anyone else have issues with how convoluted it really is to add mp3 files to an ipod touch? Add a folder to your library, wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing. Hit sync a few times and agree to all your old settings being overwritten (when all it really does is update). A $10 mp3 player allows me to right click and say "Send to..." Fuck you apple.

Re:Haha, good

[Sponge Bath]

"iTunes is about as useful as malware."

The ghost of Steve Jobs rattles his chains at you. (oooooohhhh...)
Yes, he is dead. Apple built an animatronic replica to placate shareholders.

Re:Haha, good

[_merlin]

I have too much music for simple drag and drop to be useful. I like iTunes' smart playlists, which effectively give me a query language into my music library. If you do just want to drag and drop, tell iTunes that you want to manage the music on your iPod manually. You'll still have to use iTunes, but you'll be able to drag stuff on and off the device.

Re:Haha, good

[edsousa]

Check Winamp, or Amarok, or foobar2000. All good media players with smart playlists and capable to synchronize with MP3 players.

Re:Haha, good

[Anonymous Coward]

If you do just want to drag and drop, tell iTunes that you want to manage the music on your iPod manually. You'll still have to use iTunes, but you'll be able to drag stuff on and off the device.

Oh, so that's all I need to do to be able to copy music off of an iPod? Well, that's intuitive, huh?

Except, of course, that DOESN'T ACTUALLY WORK THAT WAY.

All that does is make a special playlist that iTunes copies to the iPod. You still have to copy music into iTunes, then add it to that special playlist, then sync the iPod and make yet another copy.

And, of course, since you're now doing it manually, you lose all your other playlists, meaning all your music is in one giant unsearchable lump. Making that feature COMPLETELY WORTHLESS.

Re:Haha, good

[dhovis]

Add a folder to your library, wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing.

In iTunes Preferences: Go to "Advanced". Uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library". iTunes will leave your files where they are and just index them.

Personally I like the way iTunes organizes my music and keeps the actual files out of my way, but YMMV.

Re:Haha, good

[Anonymous Coward]

You can disable the copying you know. Its an option called "keep my itunes library organised" or something like that. As for the send to part, well that's not really viable for people with huge music libraries, or people who want playlists for thier music. Not to mention the apps etc for the touch. If you really want drag and drop then don't get an iPod touch as all the features that make it an ipod touch would be useless without itunes (unless you want to create all the playlist and config files etc manually of course).

Re:Haha, good

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I find myself inordinately pleased by the thought of Steve Jobs' liver rattling its chains at me.

Re:Haha, good

[goonerw]

Add a folder to your library, wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing.

You must be using a different iTunes to the rest of us. I've been using it for over 5 years and it's never done that for me. There is an option for it to "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" but that's unchecked by default.

Re:Haha, good

[RickRussellTX]

wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing.

It's a checkbox in the Advanced preferences. And you can see why they start with it turned on -- people who don't understand the filesystem would get *seriously* confused when they deleted some Blankety-Blank folder that they didn't remember creating in their My Documents folder and suddenly music disappeared from iTunes. Plus, it's easier to keep metadata (covers, for example) in the same location as the music, since otherwise you couldn't rely on having write access.

Re:Haha, good

[_merlin]

I didn't say anything bad about any other music players. They could be great for all I know. I was simply pointing out that managing a music player's contents manually doesn't scale well with large music libraries.

Re:Haha, good

[_merlin]

Have you actually used iTunes? You don't need a "special playlist" if you're manually managing your music. The music doesn't become unsearchable on the iPod, either - you still get Genre/Artist/Album grouping. You can create a playlist and tell iTunes to sync only that playlist, but if you do this, the "special playlist" is your own creation. If you don't want to copy the music into iTunes, turn off "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" - then iTunes will just keep references to the music files wherever you stored them. As to making "another copy" on the iPod, you'll always have "another copy" on your music player, no matter how you get it there. I'd be happy to hear some valid criticisms of iTunes, but you haven't given any yet. Hang on, I'll think of a few myself: the iTunes store links you can't turn off, the stupid non-standard scroll bars, the"Genius" misfeature, no longer licensing the device plugin API, etc. There are plenty of real issues to bitch about with iTunes, but the /. trolls always seem to make up their own imaginary ones.

Re:Haha, good

[kklein]

Seriously does anyone else have issues with how convoluted it really is to add mp3 files to an ipod touch?

Not me. Plug in to charge, unplug when you are leaving the house. Everything is already synced. That's convoluted?

Add a folder to your library, wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing.

As other posters have pointed out, you don't have to have it set up that way. If you want to have your music strewn all over your hard drive in random places that are hard to keep track of and hard to back up, Apple will oblidge.

I'm sorry that you don't know how to use the software, but I'm glad that all my music is in one folder.

Hit sync a few times and agree to all your old settings being overwritten (when all it really does is update).

This is the one I can't figure out. The only time I hit "sync" is when I've told the program not to sync automatically, or if I've changed some playlists or something while it is plugged in and already synced. I don't think I've ever had to hit it "a few times," and I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about with the "all your old settings will be overwritten" message. Are you sure you're not hitting "Restore?"

Again... I would like to humbly suggest that you do not know how to use the software.

A $10 mp3 player allows me to right click and say "Send to..."

Okay, that's cool. I don't see how that helps with podcast subscriptions, playlists, and certain subsets of the library syncing to one device and others going to others, or how that helps you keep star ratings synced so that Party Shuffle preferentially selects songs you like better, or basically how that would be better than having a single, highly-customizable program handle all that for you, but if you want to do it that way, why didn't you just buy one of those FongTech "Super-Maxi CyberSong Glory" MP3 players that are all the rage these days, instead of the pokey little iPod Touch?

Re:Haha, good

[Paul Carver]

Seriously does anyone else have issues with how convoluted it really is to add mp3 files to an ipod touch? Add a folder to your library, wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing. Hit sync a few times and agree to all your old settings being overwritten (when all it really does is update).

PEBKAC

Whether iTunes copies files or not is a user configurable setting. Personally I want iTunes to manage it's copy of my library without touching the original files. In my case the original files (ripped with EAC and LAME) are a backup on separate physical disc from my iTunes library.

My smart playlist "Recent Additions" contains everything with a "Date Added" property within the last 30 days and is automatically synced to my iPhone. So I don't even need to have my iPhone connected when I add stuff to my iTunes library and they'll still get loaded onto my iPhone whenever I happen to connect it.

So your issues with how convoluted it is are purely based out of your own ignorance. For me it's two steps: 1) drag file to iTunes. 2) Plug in iPhone cable.

Re:Haha, good

[TRRosen]

Here's a thought learn how to use your software.

iTunes is making copies because you told it to in the preferences.

if iTunes is to complex for you sell your computer and buy an acubus.

Re:Haha, good

[univalue]

but why does itunes need to be running in the background when not in use. I call that malware. There are three processes by default on system startup. Yes I know how to remove them and did. That why I do not use itunes.

Re:Haha, good

[Midnight Thunder]

Yes, he is dead. Apple built an animatronic replica to placate shareholders.

Wow, I thought Jonathan Ive had done a good job with Eve, but designing a life like Steve Jobs is amazing. How good a job did engineering do with the RDF?

Re:Haha, good

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, when I went through the pop-up adverts for AVG's pay products that their "free" product offers, I thought the same thing of AVG. (Right before I switched to Avast)

Re:Haha, good

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if I quite agree with you, but the sentiment is on the money. I recently was made an offer I couldn't refuse to buy an ipod touch, and its quite a cool device. Not quite as good as the old Creative Zen I had before, as it has no radio, but the ability to play games and read ebooks is nice. The big drawback is the need to use itunes on windows to do anything. I had got used to plugging the old zen into any of the pcs at home any drag and drop what ever onto it. Now, itunes or nothing. Do mac users have any idea how crap itunes really is, or do they all just find something better? I'm a bit spoiled with my Ubuntu laptop, as there any number of great media players available, but nothing that'll see my ipod. I had forgotten what a bunch of control freaks they are at Apple not having used a Mac for 15 years or so.

Re:Haha, good

[Darkness404]

then don't get an iPod touch as all the features that make it an ipod touch would be useless without itunes

Owning a touch and really hating booting into Windows to sync with it, what I want is. A) about 6 gigs of space (I don't have a huge music library) B) Wi-Fi and a usable browser C) a decent enough e-mail client D) games E) Costs no more than $225. Right now the iPod touch is about the only thing that can give me all of those. I had a GP2x that I used for a while that gave me everything but Wi-Fi but it had questionable build quality (it never broke but it felt very fragile), chewed through batteries like there was no tomorrow (seriously, I got about 6 hours of use with a set of batteries playing music). If the iPod Touch let you use emulators I would almost forgive the other faults but the games are seriously lacking on the iPhone. I'm thinking about getting a Pandora if they ever end up shipping.

Re:Haha, good

[Anonymous Coward]

wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing.

Lrn2 iTunes. There is a well-documented option to turn off this behavior. My impression is that it was designed to help idiots not lose music files - imagine J. Random Luser who downloads an mp3 to his Desktop and adds it to the iTunes library. He's not going to think, "I shouldn't delete that file from the desktop" - after all, it's "in his library".

Re:Haha, good

[geekboy642]

Dunno if you're aware of this, but you can make iTunes not copy music into its special folder. Hit Ctrl+, and go to the Advanced tab. Uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to library". Then when you drag stuff into iTunes it just adds a reference to it in the library, but leaves your original files alone.

As for wanting an iPod you can just drag music on and off of? Well, you bought the wrong device for that, sparky. iThings are for people that don't want to mess around with folders and files. If you're just in love with the glossy white cover, but want Windows-style awkwardness, there's Rockbox for you.

Re:Haha, good

[oogoliegoogolie]

Yeesh, another example of ignorance over intelligence. Are you too busy to spend 2 minutes check the settings??

1) In itunes preferences you can tell itunes NOT to copy the mp3 file to the itunes library...the files will remain wherever you leave them.
2) Once again in iTunes, when the ipod is connected under the music tab there is a checkbox that allows you to manually update your ipod. Once you set that then you can drag and drop any mp3 from itunes to your ipod WITHOUT syncing.

Why do people talk about things they no nothing about?

Re:Haha, good

[adolf]

Oh, good.

So we still get yet another weird player-specific database to try to keep sync'd with reality.

Hooray, and stuff.

Re:Haha, good

[Graymalkin]

iTunes does not run in the background. The iTunesHelper app does. This app recognizes when an iPod is plugged in and launches iTunes if you've got that option set.

Re:Haha, good

[Graymalkin]

What the fuck are you talking about? iTunes populates its database automatically from ID3 information in files you add to the library. When importing a CD it will look up CDDB information for you and populate the album's information from that. I can't think of an online music store that doesn't ship files with ID3 information. If you're importing CDs without looking up CDDB information or downloading untagged albums from BitTorrent you're just shitting in your own breakfast. Even then iTunes can still look up an album's information from CDDB to populate its database. It is absolutely trivial to manage the information in iTunes' database.

Re:Haha, good

[flydpnkrtn]

Brings a whole new meaning to the "Fake Steve Jobs blog" lol... hmm what do we call it? iSteve?

Re:Haha, good

[wiz_80]

Come to that, I don't see iTunes store links, and I quite like the Genius playlists. They work just fine for me, and while I don't use them that much, they're better than shuffle for a drive that is longer than one album's worth of music.

Speaking of shuffle, I wish the motion sensor didn't turn off when the iPod locks. It makes the whole shake-to-shuffle feature much less useful, as the iPod is usually locked by the time I want to shuffle.

Re:Haha, good

[adolf]

And what if I change this library?

Oh. Right. iTunes breaks.

*yawn*

Re:Haha, good

[Briareos]

I didn't say anything bad about any other music players. They could be great for all I know. I was simply pointing out that managing a music player's contents manually doesn't scale well with large music libraries.

But at least foobar2000 lets me fill my iPod without ever having to use the abomination that is iTunes... what's not to like?

np: Orbital - Sad But True (2Orbital (Disc 2))

Re:Haha, good

[Morth]

Actually, no. At least not on Mac, don't really know much about the windows version. iTunes keeps track of the inode of the file, so as long as you just move them around, it will be able to find them even if the path changes.

Re:Haha, good

[Anonymous Coward]

You're so spoiled with your Ubuntu laptop and its vast number of great media players that you've never tried to manage an iPod using Rhythmbox? Running Kubuntu? Amarok claims iPod support. If you're going to randomly beat the drum for Linux then at least try and have the faintest clue.

Re:Haha, good

[StuartHankins]

Personally I like the way iTunes organizes my music and keeps the actual files out of my way, but YMMV.

I absolutely agree. Who would have thought I had so many duplicate songs? Only after constantly finding songs all over the place -- for instance Eric Clapton in 4 different categories (Classic Rock, 70's, Rock, and Male Vocalists) did I finally give up and relinquish control.

The only thing I haven't figured out how to do is handle situations where you have the same song, same version on multiple albums. In most music organizers I've seen you have to keep multiple copies, which is what I'm doing now. If I want to play an album, it's usually not "play every song in this album that doesn't happen to be in another album" or some perverse logic like that.

Re:Haha, good

[DavidTC]

And if you don't have that optin set, it runs in the background...and...um...does nothing.

Re:Haha, good

[adolf]

On Windows (within which, if there is any concept of an inode, it is totally ignored by all software), it breaks.

But even on a Mac: If I move a file to a different drive, or over to a network share -- the inode trick won't be sufficient, and breakage will still ensue.

Why the heck is this news?

[arcade]

Seriously.

Anti virus software has been breaking stuff for more than a decade. There will always be false positives, and there will always be stuff that hasn't been tested, thought about, and so forth.

Of course, now, after this incident, they'll add a unittest to make sure that this exact thing doesn't happen again, and maybe add some for other music services. But hey - this is NOT something that should be thought of as wrong, foolish or whatever. These things *happen*.

Anti-virus software has signatures, heuristics, and so forth. It'll be wrong from time to time. It's actually just business as usual.

So, why is this news?

Re:Why the heck is this news?

[nate_in_ME]

If you read through the discussion on the Apple forums, you will probably be(I know I was) surprised at how many people uninstalled iTunes out of fear of it being infected. Of course, there were just as many that uninstalled AVG in order to keep their iTunes work.

So, while those of us here may know all about how common false positives, etc. are with AV software, reading through the now 20+ pages on Apple's site shows that the majority of iTunes users don't have the knowledge that we do.

Re:Why the heck is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

If false positives aren't news, how will you know whether the alerts you get are from real viruses or false positives?

For example, take contaminated food. It happens regularly, but it still makes the news, just like murders and car accidents. At least in the case of false positives and contaminated food, the news double as a public announcement.

Re:Why the heck is this news?

[B3ryllium]

It's news because it horribly breaks iTunes, and (last I heard) causes re-installation to fail.

Of course, that's only if you believe iTunes isn't horribly broken to start with ;-)

Re:Why the heck is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

shows that the majority of iTunes users don't have the knowledge that we do.

I'm more than half convinced that the majority of iTunes users are too stupid to use a computer. But that's just my opinion.

Re:Why the heck is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's apple.

Re:Why the heck is this news?

[Jerry Smith]

I'm more than half convinced that the majority of Windows users are too stupid to use a computer. But that's just my opinion.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Why the heck is this news?

[Brannon]

There are also a lot of iTunes users that don't know what a computer virus is, because they use Macs...

Re:Why the heck is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

"the majority of iTunes users don't have the knowledge that we do."

And the award for understatement of the year goes to...

Nothing to do with shares

[TrippTDF]

causing a minor annoyance to users wouldn't do anything for Palm, so why would they bother? It's probably some poor detection on the part of AVG.

Re:Nothing to do with shares

[56]

Oh, so that WOULDN'T be effective, then? Gee whiz! ps, I'm pretty sure the 'palm shares' remark was sarcastic.

No Surprise

[TheRealMindChild]

AVG does not have any information on this particular virus in their virus encyclopedia

That is the case for ~99% of the viruses in their "encyclopedia".

Re:No Surprise

[Ultracrepidarian]

I have never located any information in their "virus encyclopedia" for any virus flagged on my machine. It is totally useless.

Re:No Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

so true... their encyclopaedia seems to be a bit of an uncyclopaedia

A false positive is front page news?

[Enderandrew]

Anti-virus programs have false positives all the time over stupid shit.

1 - Inherently, an anti-virus can only scan against a database of known problems. New problems won't be detected.
2 - It has been demonstrated that it is VERY easy to spoof detection.
3 - AVG did far worse recently when the firewall portion of their full internet security suite installed drivers for each network connection you had. Said drivers would cause Windows to BSOD. The only solution was to uninstall AVG. I assume that would be a bigger story than a false positive.

If you're really worried about security, don't run with admin rights, run with a resident program that detects possible changes and stops them before they happen, or better yet, run Linux.

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[Pheonix28]

If you're really worried about security, don't run with admin rights,

This is a stupid thing to say, and you are stupid for having said it. Lots of software still requires that you be administrator.

and then everything you said was thrown out the window like it was never there.

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[Enderandrew]

Tell that to Mac users back in the System 6 and 7 days, who had access to a free antivirus program which detected suspicious behavior.

This is different from an anti-virus scanner.

What do you mean? Link?

Are you incapable of using Google? Heck, many virus scans can be fooled simply by padding an executable so it doesn't match a hash.

Nah, nobody runs that shit.

AVG must be out of business if no one runs their commercial product.

Way to contradict your point #1.

I'm discussing two different types of apps. Please attempt to follow the discussion.

I have about reached my limit of frustration with Linux, because I use a laptop.

My wife uses Linux exclusively on her laptop. She has done so on her past couple of laptops over the years with ATI and Nvidia graphics.

I've never needed to reboot to activate a second display. I'm really not familiar with the problems you're describing.

Literally, I've found that tons of hardware "just works" better with Linux than Windows. I don't download or hunt down drivers. Most printers I plug in are just detected and work. Heck, in Vista you can't even get drivers for most older printers.

What distro were you running?

Try this LiveCD, and tell me if you run into any problems.

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso/KDE4-UNSTABLE-Live.x86_64-1.2.98-Build1.1.iso

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[karnal]

I'm sure the grandparent is gonna really want to try your link when it says UNSTABLE right in the filename. ;)

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[El Capitaine]

Heh...I agree that OpenSUSE is a great distro...I just find it funny that your link contains the word "UNSTABLE" in all caps =D

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[Wildclaw]

This is a stupid thing to say, and you are stupid for having said it. Lots of software still requires that you be administrator.

In that case you have four choices.

1. You explictly trust it and run that specific application in admin mode.
2. You run it in a virtual machine.
3. You run it in a sandbox (I like sandboxie).
4. You don't run it and use something else.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that this applies to even non-admin mode. All applications should be run in a virtual machine or sandboxed unless they are explicitly trusted. These are things that any modern operating system should be able to handle (not that any do by default, except possibly some rare linux/bsd variant).

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[Enderandrew]

It is a weekly snapshot build. That doesn't mean that it is actually really unstable. I run weekly snapshots of KDE 4.3, OpenOffice, Firefox, wine, etc. from openSUSE repositories.

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[Enderandrew]

Actually the parent is wrong. Software that claims it needs administrator rights rarely if ever does need it.

Individual processes can be elevated, and usually the app just needs access to write to a folder. Setting those individual rights is far better than allowing all apps to run as administrator.

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[adolf]

So it says it's UNSTABLE, but that doesn't mean that it is actually really unstable.

I interpret that to mean that it's already lying to me before I even get a chance to install it.

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[Repossessed]

1 - Inherently, an anti-virus can only scan against a database of known problems. New problems won't be detected.

Most anti viruses have had behavior based virus protection for years. Even AVG has it these days.

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[Ash-Fox]

Tell that to Mac users back in the System 6 and 7 days, who had access to a free antivirus program which detected suspicious behavior.

Heuristics can be fooled easily too.

Re:A false positive is front page news?

[cdrguru]

Plenty of badly written stuff for Windows 9x requires Administrator rights on XP. In general, these applications do not do very well with Vista and require lots of work to get them running at all. The right answer is the application needs to be updated to make the user's life simpler.

What usually happens is the user becomes convinced that Vista is no good because their 1997 applications don't run well on it. They aren't going to like Windows 7 any better with their Windows 9x applications.

why is AVG still a major player?

[13th seer]

AVG turned to fucking donkey shit after 7.5. it blows my mind people still use it. the company treats their end users like idiots, their software behaves like the malware it claims to rid your system of, and eats up a shitton of resources to boot

yet it still seems to be one of the most popular free scanners, if not the most. I don't get it

it's hard to find a decent free antivirus that doesn't nag or suck these days. iirc Avira had nag screens, and a ridiculous amount of false positives. the least crap one I've used seems to be avast!. it seems to detect a decent amount of viruses, keeps out of the way, and and doesn't eat up a lot of resources

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed comrade, avast! all the way. i uninstalled AVG and have never used it again since after is obliterated my old XP machine's ability to boot by deleting a critical Windows file. thankfully i had a bunch of livecds to recover files and fix the problems...

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[maxume]

8.5 is much saner than 8.0 was.

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[Anonymous Coward]

and, of course, has its own share of false positives;
http://www.google.com/search?q="avast+false+positive"

Grisoft doesn't treat me like anything because I use the free version - I understand that with that I get limited support, if any.

AVG hasn't ever been 'in my way', and certainly not like any of the malware I read about (inserting themselves into pages, turning your machine into a spam bot, making it impossible to reach websites, etc.) -- 'd really love to see a clarification on that statement.

And as for resources - it's currently using 10MB memory, which is 280MB less than the FireFox I type this in. I think I'll live even if I agree 10MB seems rather high. CPU use.. well, Task Manager is at the top with 3%, ThunderBird hovers between 1 and 2, and occasionally Explorer seems to do its thing. All the AVG*.exe processes are firmly stuck at zero. Again. clarification?

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[nulldaemon]

AVG hasn't ever been 'in my way', and certainly not like any of the malware I read about (inserting themselves into pages, turning your machine into a spam bot, making it impossible to reach websites, etc.) -- 'd really love to see a clarification on that statement.

A while back AVG pushed out a poorly designed malware scanner that would scan search results before you clicked on them; AVG would basically visit each link that showed up in your search results. AVG traffic soon outstripped real traffic about 10 times, and there was a very strong backlash from popular websites (Slashdot, Whirlpool) who accused AVG of a massive DOS attack, as well as urged their members to choose a different virus product. Quite a few people seem to be still holding this one mistake against AVG, even though it has little relevance today...

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[ScrewMaster]

yet it still seems to be one of the most popular free scanners, if not the most. I don't get it

I think you answered your own question.

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[xactuary]

Ask yourself why Windows is still a major player why don't you? Sounds like somebody got up on the wrong side of the Leopard/Vista flameware this morning!

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[kevingolding2001]

Quite a few people seem to be still holding this one mistake against AVG, even though it has little relevance today...

I think that what people are still upset about is not the initial mistake, but the "you have to break some eggs" comment by AVG chief of research Roger Thompson in response to the complaints.

This demonstrates a certain arrogance on the part of AVG, and that attitude is what people are still wary of.

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[Deanalator]

Every AV is donkey shit. AVG happens to be the only free one.

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The problem is that there is momentum. Finding a trustworthy AV program on your own takes some savvy, because there are a lot of shady operators that spam the google index with shady products. They might look legitimate, but a tech savvy person, they might stumble across a trap.

Personally, I thought Avast was kind of annoying. Except for 8.0, I really haven't had much trouble with AVG. It was with 8.0 that I tried some others, AVG 8.5 seems to work just fine now.

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree with this. I have seen AVG sit there without a single warning over definite virus files (folders become hidden and new exe files pop up with same name). It also is such a resource hug, and when it scans your hard drive, forget about trying to do anything during that time. Avast to me also seems to be the best, though personally I just run linux. Can't afford to have downtime cuz of daily virus problems.

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[ArcCoyote]

It's not the only free one, but the other free ones aren't much better.

Watch out for Microsoft Security Essentials (Morro).

It's a drop-in replacement for Windows Defender on Vista and Win 7, and it's basically Windows Defender with realtime antivirus. Lightweight too, it's using 56 MB on my system right now. That sounds like a lot, but come on, we're in the days of 2GB RAM as a minimum.

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[initialE]

This is why: http://www.google.com.sg/search?q=free+antivirus
I remember first running across AVG through google search too.

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[petermgreen]

The thing is i'm not going to use a beta or even freshly released version of windows and even if vista's problems have been mostly overcome by better hardware and service packs now as some people claim I don't particularlly feel like learning the quirks of a version that hardly anywhere uses. Nor do I like the fact that there is no version that does not require either activation or a code in the bios.

So for the next couple of years at least i'm going to be staying on XP for any machines that need to run windows. I'm sure many here feel the same.

Re:why is AVG still a major player?

[ArcCoyote]

Windows 7 rocks, as much as any version of Windows can.

But great spaghetti gods, Ubuntu Jaunty boots in 30 seconds on my laptop, and if I can just get the frickin' sound to work... the modules are THERE, but ALSA is broken in Jaunty. It worked in Intrepid, and it works in Karmic alpha 3, but so much else is borked in Karmic... way to go, guys.

I need to stay on Windows for one reason on my big box: DVRing ClearQAM+analog from a STB.

My friend runs MythTV, and it's just not as solid as Media Center. Especially with the trouble-free Xbox 360 extender functionality.

Believe me, I would love to sell my 360 (and cancel the $50 a year XBL Gold I never use for anything but Netflix), ditch Windows for good, setup MythTV, get a PS3 for games, media, and Blu-Ray, and use a Roku box for Netflix and MythFrontend... but it's just not there, dammit. There's no reason it shouldn't be, but it's not.

Disclaimer: I'm drunk, so I'm probably going to be extremely amused by this in the morning. Time to go install FreeBSD.

iPhone

[Enderandrew]

I really don't like Apple as a company, but I broke down and got an iPhone. I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love the concept of the App Store, but browsing it is a pain. I can see popular apps at the top, but I can't do a power search, or browse by user ratings. I can't put contacts into groups. I can't edit my address book or calendar from iTunes. Syncing with Outlook is broken. Synching with Yahoo is broken. I had to create a new Gmail account, dump my contacts into that, edit them in Gmail, and sync them back, and then certain fields like birthdays wouldn't transfer over.

I can't transfer files or documents to my phone because the damned thing is so locked down for "security" reasons (ie, we're concerned you might pirate apps, even though jailbreaking is easy). The calendar app is a joke, as with the contacts portion. As a smart-phone platform, the iPhone is pretty shoddy.

As a music/gaming/internet device, the iPhone is pretty slick. Safari is fast and simple, though on a small screen, they should have a full-screen mode. They finally wised up and added a landscape keyboard (ages after Google was showing it in Android dev kits and phones), except most places in the OS, and most apps won't allow you to use it. You can't change the small smattering of SMS tones. They didn't add multimedia messaging until the 3.0 release of the software. They just finally added voice memos.

You can't place apps in categories, or theme the dashboard. Overall, I keep hearing how Apple's UI is the best in the world and they just do everything right. I enjoy my iPhone, don't get me wrong. But this UI leaves a lot to be desired.

Re:iPhone

[Darkness404]

or browse by user ratings

Those are broken though. You either have a bunch of 5 star ratings so the app is rated like 5 stars... except for the fact that the newest update pretty much broke the app (see the lolcats app for an example) or a bunch of 1 and 2 star ratings but an update made the app amazing.

Re:iPhone

[Enderandrew]

Fair enough, but rating should be weighted in a meaningful way.

A new app with 1 person rating it 1 or 5 stars shouldn't count as much as 1,000 ratings of 4 stars.

Re:iPhone

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get the palm pre, it fixes all the bad things of the iphone while keeping all the good things.

Re:iPhone

[Enderandrew]

I really wanted an Android phone, but T-Mobile isn't in Omaha.

The Palm Pre was next on my list. I went to Best Buy last month, and they said they wouldn't get any more shipments until August. The initial shipment also had hardware problems apparently.

And while Web OS looks interesting, there aren't nearly as many apps available.

That's why I ended up with the iPhone.

Re:iPhone

[forkazoo]

You can't place apps in categories, or theme the dashboard. Overall, I keep hearing how Apple's UI is the best in the world and they just do everything right. I enjoy my iPhone, don't get me wrong. But this UI leaves a lot to be desired.

Being terrible and being the best are nowhere near being mutually exclusive when it comes to phone UI's, unfortunately.

Re:iPhone

[PhunkySchtuff]

I hear you, and agree with a lot of this sentiment, but what on earth has this got to do with AVG breaking iTunes?

Re:iPhone

[DarkVader]

http://blog.iphone-dev.org/

Jailbreak it. You'll be a lot happier.

Re:iPhone

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a G1 and have it unlocked. Then use it with any GSM carrier (like AT&T for example). Sucks that you had to waste money on an iPhone though. I have a G1 and its great - a smartphone you're actually in control of. Sad that that's so innovative.

Wise choice?

[Hurricane78]

Maybe it rightfully flags DRM files. Maybe they also include a rootkit. At least it would make sense to me, if their heuristic would detect sneaky encrypted files looking like normal music files.

what?

[prozaker]

no false positive there

Avastly superior antivirus...

[kms_one]

My antivirus is Avastly superior to AVG, but I don't use iTunes anyway. Sansa ftw.

Re:Avastly superior antivirus...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use Windows so I don't get viruses, and I don't listen to music, because I don't like to pay the RIAA.

See, I can write completely pointless, smug, and unhelpful posts too.

Re:Avastly superior antivirus...

[SheeEttin]

...with Rockbox, no less. Nothing beats a nice indexed USB mass storage device.

freeballer

[freeballer]

kinda stupid to compare palm cracking of itunes and this false positive, used to be virus scanners found false positives in x:\windows praise jebus now it just mucks up your itunes.. That being said, can't it not be defined as as an exception anyways? lol Not saying this wasn't a dumb mistake just saying its not newsworthy, inprobable, or easily fixed...

Re:freeballer

[Anonymous Coward]

what the fuck did you just write? Lay off the freebase kemo sabe

Viruses ? Antiviruses ?...

[koolfy]

... Do they still exist ?

I'm sorry, I've been using Linux for 5 years now, so I'm a little bit ahead of your world...
Just tell me when you get to the package manager revolution, or at least the trustful and reliable software era.

*no offense.*

Re:Viruses ? Antiviruses ?...

[timmarhy]

gain some market share, then we will talk. kthxbai.

Slashdot Journalistic Ethics

[mysidia]

From the summary: One user there had an interesting thought: 'Maybe Palm has some shares in AVG...MUAHAAAA!!'

It's nearly culpable negligence (IMO, lack of due care) to repeat a statement like that one, which has no basis in reality, and could significantly tarnish AVG's reputation.

Please see this quote:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." --Robert J. Hanlon

Re:Slashdot Journalistic Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

How's the weather down there? Gosh, you look like an ant from here!

Sincerely,
The joke

Re:Slashdot Journalistic Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

When has that ever stopped kdawson from posting?

Re:Slashdot Journalistic Ethics

[MrMista_B]

Y'know, AVG doesn't have a good reputation /to/ tarnish. The only people who use them are the ignorant or willfully stupid. Which, admittedly, is a lot.

Re:Slashdot Journalistic Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nearly culpable negligence (IMO, lack of due care) to repeat a statement like that one, which has no basis in reality, and could significantly tarnish AVG's reputation.

This is amateur considering some of the shit that's said about Microsoft around here.

Re:Slashdot Journalistic Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'know, AVG doesn't have a good reputation /to/ tarnish.

[citation needed]

Re:And that is why...

[jayemcee]

Avast is great, never any issues or any real nags. I did just get a suggestion to visit a blog page where the CEO chatters a bit but they seem to be in good shape at the moment...

AVG??

[countertrolling]

Not them again! I suppose they'll hit Linux next...Don't know how, but anything can happen...

Trust Issues?

[TheFatherMind]

I took it upon myself to drop them (AVG) a quick note telling them that I was hard pressed to pay/trust my welfare to a company that did not know what its own viruses were. And then I discovered that they really did not want to talk to or hear from me. It took me almost 10 minutes to find a form I could actually successfully type something into (Try it yourself!). And to do so I had to choose some very odd options from the dropdowns as they had NOTHING related to simply giving them feedback or "Other". It is a shame as I have been doing rather well with their free version.

AVG Free breaks Win7 RC1

[ProfanityHead]

AVG Free breaks Win7 RC1 on 2 of my machines that run it. Locks up explorer constantly even doing simple shell things like opening a toolbar I have created on the taskbar. After 3 weeks I couldn't take it anymore and now am testing Avast free.

Re:AVG Free breaks Win7 RC1

[Ash-Fox]

Last I checked, AVG doesn't officially support any win7 build to begin with.

Re:AVG Free breaks Win7 RC1

[ProfanityHead]

Last I checked, when I downloaded it, it listed the download for Win7/Vista/XP.

Yet another reason to not use proprietary garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

You always get screwed. Always. So in this case AVG decided they don't like Apple so they decided to screw users of Apple software as a punishment. You read about this sort of thing at least every month.

McAffee/Norton Syndrome

[Solr_Flare]

It's part of the natural life cycle of anti-virus software. Anti-virus software gets really good -> geeks and techies jump on the bandwagon -> they spread this to their non-techie friends -> AV software gets bloated/crappy over time -> geeks abandon it slowly over time -> regular consumers continue to use it forever until a geek comes along to force them to use the current hotness.

False positive on a DLL? That is nothing ...

[kbahey]

False positive from a DLL? That is nothing ...

How about TrendMicro giving a false positive on a valid PHP plain text file that is part of Drupal!

Re:False positive on a DLL? That is nothing ...

[Val314]

Our virus scanner at work once decided that *all* .vbs and .xml files are bad and deleted them as soon as the were accessed.

Re:False positive on a DLL? That is nothing ...

[Alari]

I had AVG give me a false positive on a .cs (text) file once, because it contained the word "poison".

Re:Yet another reason to not use proprietary garba

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably incompetence, not maliciousness.

Even if it were, you think open source is immune from this kind of thing? ABP vs NoScript?

This identifies a weakness in AV techniques

[erroneus]

The problem of misidentification will continue to grow as the number of unique malware items are identified. It is getting to the point that software publishers need to start submitting information about their official published versions to AV projects to avoid misidentification. Such information would include size, checksum + md5sum + sha1sum or something along those lines. In this way operating system files and commonly used software could avoid misidentification I think.

Slashdot can be a lot of things

[msimm]

but you're asking it to be humorless.

Not only is the joke topical (in the sense it's related to another recent story) but it's made clear that it's a joke by keeping it in context (...MUAHAAAA!!).

You sir, FAIL.

Damn!

[rueger]

I always knew that I liked AVG, but this is just the coolest! iTunes really is rather virus like.

Re:Damn!

[dicobalt]

I agree, this is more of a "feature" of AVG then a problem.

Dragging into itunes does nothing

[ArchieBunker]

Like the subject says dragging files into itunes does nothing. It was one of the first things I tried. Setting sync to manual gave me the message about overwriting original contents. God forbid your mp3s don't have ID3 tags because itunes sticks them all in some unknown folder instead of paying attention to the filename.

Its like people never knew how to manage mp3 files before itunes came along. How hard is it to organize the files and folders yourself? I seem to have no problems doing so. Are you keeping 100,000 files in a single folder or what?

Re:Dragging into itunes does nothing

[DavidTC]

Its like people never knew how to manage mp3 files before itunes came along. How hard is it to organize the files and folders yourself? I seem to have no problems doing so. Are you keeping 100,000 files in a single folder or what?

And, what's more, there are plenty of tools help you add tags to files missing them, that let you rename MP3 files in a logical way, however you want them too. You specify the filename and path using tags, and the software checks to make sure they're all there and moves them for you. MusicBrainz has one that even can look up labels based on the music in addition to the CDDB, add tags and move them wherever you want.

The real issue I have with iTunes is that I don't use a single fucking player to listen to music. I have XMBC, I have foobar2000, I have a USB-connected MP3 player, I have a SD-card player for my car, I have a mini-SD card in my cell phone. And I occasionally try out others.

I keep all my music on a NAS. For my laptop, I've marked the music I want to take with as 'available offline', and foobar2000 does a refresh on startup...if I'm at home, I get my whole library, if not, I just get the offline stuff.

I guess iTunes is useful for people who are listening to their music in exactly two places: The computer that iTunes is installed on, and an iPod synced to that.

Oh, and the whole 'I don't have time to copy music manually to my mp3 player' just blows my mind. You don't have time...to start a file copy? Really? (I'm assuming that the copy itself takes roughly the same amount of time.)

iTune people seem to be saying they don't have time to select the music, which makes no damn sense to me. So they...have no control over the music they listen to? Or they mean they're okay with letting iTunes pick it, possibly via 'similar artist' or genre or something?

Well, I hate to burst their bubble, but most software mp3 players can do that, and even limit it to a total size, and then send the file to a 'drive', which is what normal mp3 players show up as. That's how I fill up my portable players and SD cards, using foobar2000. That isn't some amazing epic feature of iTunes.

The only feature I've ever heard of that 'syncing' with the iPod has, that other software mp3 players don't, is the ability to copy back the 'number of listens' and 'ratings' if you've set one, which most hardware mp3 players don't bother to care about.

Becuase it's free

[Sycraft-fu]

Many people don't want to pay for their virus scanner. There really isn't so much out there in the way of good, no cost virus scanners. The ones that are good, well the companies that make them know they are good and thus charge for them. NOD32 is excellent, and ESET seems to be aware of this fact. Thus there's a trial but no free version, and the full version isn't super cheap. Their produce is quality, they want money for it.

As long as there are plenty of people who want a free virus scanner, they'll be a market for crappy scanners that don't cost anything.

Re:This poster is a market droid plant!

[Enderandrew]

The main topic is iTunes. Someone joking said iTunes and all Apple products are a virus. I went on a tangent. Is it off the main topic? Yes. Is it completely off topic? Well, no.

People can feel free to mod it off topic if they so desire. But frankly, tangents are just a reality in Slashdot.

Solution here:

[Jerry Smith]

http://forums.avg.com/ww.avg-free-forum?sec=thread&act=show&id=7965#post_7965

Confirmed false positive, corrected in next update.

I can't wait for the OSX version of AVG! :)

Better name for the android Steve:

[Anonymous Coward]

Brings a whole new meaning to the "Fake Steve Jobs blog" lol... hmm what do we call it? iSteve?

No, iRobot.

Cheers,

What's the diff. between a virus and an antivirus?

[Nicolas MONNET]

One is program that slows down your computer, takes up RAM and disk space, erases files, and generally ends up costing you quite a bit of money and time.

The other is a program that reproduces automatically.

I think it's time to stop recommending AVG

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to recommend AVG for the cheap bastards I had for clients. Between this and AVG 8 and the linkscanner fiasco I'm thinking it's time to start telling people to use something else. Suggestions?

Re:Too many songs, you dirty fucking pirate?

[Menkhaf]

Cartman, is that you?

a Virus in My MP3

[JosedeNoche]

next time, i'll use Ogg

Re:What's the diff. between a virus and an antivir

[QuoteMstr]

Antivirus programs don't actually do much anyway other than provide that warm, fuzzy feeling. If you run without administrator privileges and keep your machine updated, there's really no need for one.

Re:This poster is a market droid plant!

[shutdown -p now]

Well, and your post is completely Troll. But it's okay, this is /. so we learn to live with that sort of thing.

AVG Still Broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is AVG Still Broken?
See, it hasn't flagged Ms-Outlook as a virus too!
iTunes **definitely** is a virus, so they got that correct.

Re:slashdoters are fucking faggots

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, so do you apparently.

One more thing

[Anonymous Coward]

One more thing.

AVG Rocks!!

Re:slashdoters are fucking faggots

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because slashdoters dote on slash.

Slashdotters are a different story--our perversions are much broader.