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McAfee Brand Name Will Be Replaced By Intel Security
An anonymous reader writes "At CES 2014 today, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced the McAfee brand name will be phased out and replaced by 'Intel Security,' which will identify Intel products and services in the security segment. The rebranding will begin immediately, but the transition will take up to a year before it is complete."
The BBC reports that John McAfee is happy with the decision: "'I am now everlastingly grateful to Intel for freeing me from this terrible association with the worst software on the planet. These are not my words, but the words of millions of irate users. ... My elation at Intel's decision is beyond words.'"
I'd like to be the first to thank Brian for warning us in advance, I'll be sure to add it to my list of banned products.
No sig today...
I've always considered McAfee software to be nothing but useless, bloated, annoying, bug-ridden crap that causes more problems than it solves. That's why I use Norton.
"McAfee murders viruses!"
How to remove McAfee Antivirus featuring John McAfee himself.
This video he made on how to uninstall McAfee software http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg in case anyone missed it before.
as I and everyone I know stopped using it years ago.
I frigg'n wish. Unfortunately my incompetent security group insists on McAfee. Most people in my office don't even come in on Tuesdays anymore because that's virus scan day. It starts a 1AM and nothing on your machine will work until at least 3PM. If you don't turn your machine on until 7 or 8 PM you'll be lucking to get out of the office by bedtime. McAfee has absolutely no ability to scale CPU usage, it's 100% all the time.
I absolutely hate trying to help friends or relatives resolve computer problems, only to find that the computer is infested with McAfee software that has to be dealt with first, or in some cases is the main problem. Sadly users have been brainwashed into thinking that they need this crap and is is somehow good for them. But John is far from innocent in all of this, there were serious problems even back when he had full control of what the software that bears his name did.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Also, a pile of shit by any other name is still a steamer.
More music, fewer hits
Now, I'm no rocket surgeon, but why not schedule the scan for Saturday?
That prevents people from having a decent Tuesday lunch break.
But what's even more interesting is that John McAfee uses a Flowbee to cut his hair.
Sorry, I forgot all about McAfee "anti" virus software until this story, as I and everyone I know stopped using it years ago.
The difference between a virus and an antivirus is that antivirus tends to consume more resources, do much more damage, and are generally more difficult to remove than a virus.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
NSA BINGO!! I called it first. (It's for the person who calls out the first offtopic NSA comment made by some douche bag who thinks he is very clever).
So does this mean Intel is likely to fix things and stop being malware, or just business as usual and a increasing the need for ever faster processors to run ever bloated and invasive software?
Next up: Intel Secure Core with integrated virusscanning.
Could be worse, could be Symantec/Norton. Always wondered what poor Peter Norton thought about his products after Symantec took over. They went from powerful tools no techie would want to live without to useless crap in only two revisions.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I guess they couldn't get the domain pileofshit.com
Because bad, bad, bad things happen when you miss a McAffee scan!!! Lots of computers are home/off or whatever over the weekend. At my previous place of employment, after being off the grid with my laptop for a couple of weeks, I came back and it couldn't update right since I was *SO* out of date, which we then fixed and got it to run. Then it ran back to back to back to back scans despite cancelling etc, the schedule would detect a missed scan and re-schedule a new one despite a fresh one having completed earlier in the day. My machine scanned continuously for over a week...IT eventually threw up their hands and just told me to deal with it.
Panda is linked with Scientology. That a very good reason not to get it.
Just like how comcast became Xfinity.... Same sucky service with a new name.
It's a hasbeen craptastic AV suite that is so over bloated it's not funny. IF intel hires all new programmers and cuts out 1/2 or more of the utter crap that slows everything down to a crawl, they might have a chance..
But I know it's going to be a failure. Intel might be better off just selling the assets off to an unsuspecting patsy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So is the Microsoft Windows defragmentation software.
The biggest reason to use McAfee is because it has antivirus scanners for AIX, SPARC Solaris, Linux, and other UNIX variants.
Not like this does a single thing useful. However, it does make the legal eagles happy, and in a lot of companies, they have some sworn statement that all computers on their network have antivirus on them... which means when you cut yourself another LPAR, you toss on McAfee and two cron jobs. One updates the definitions, the second does a filesystem scan. It won't ever detect anything but a false positive (barring the machine being used to store documents or Windows stuff), but it does check that box.
As for Windows, I just use the enterprise version of MSE (System Center Endpoint Protection.) All AV products suck, so might as well use something that is ICSA certified, makes the legal eagles happy, and doesn't completely useless-ify a machine. For the real malware protection, a content filter that blocks ad and malware sites by IP is used, in combination with a decent IDS/IPS.
At least your hard drive will be Thetan free.
Yup! The next-to-last time I used Symantec, I concluded that it wasn't worth paying for. The last time I used it (free trial) I decided that "free" was too costly. Since then, I actively avoid that crapware.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I actually just had to uninstall McAfee Security Scan Plus which Adobe STILL tries to bundle with the install of PDF Reader and Flash Player from a relative's computer. I also noticed that Adobe also tries to bundle Norton Security Scan with Shockwave player. Interesting and obnoxious that they are trying to get you to install both competing products with the installs of their products.
Nevermore.
So does this mean Intel is likely to fix things and stop being malware, or just business as usual and a increasing the need for ever faster processors to run ever bloated and invasive software?
Oh, it'll be better than business as usual... McAfee could always be removed by blowing away your OS, often not by anything less; but Intel has the full details on the SATA, USB, NIC, and CPU for their platform, and the capabilities of UEFI and AMT. They should be able to have McAfee baked so hard into your motherboard that you'll need a drill press to uninstall it!
McAfee may not be what I'd recommend for home use, but I would for enterprise. Their suite of tools and being able to pull together a very accurate and real time picture of a huge environment makes it very worthwhile. That, and a properly configured agent and virus scan shouldn't interfere too much outside of doing a regular full scan, and even then, the computer should still be usable, if a bit slower.
...you could begin the scans at 6:00 PM instead of 1:00 AM, so they would be finished by 8:00 the following morning...
That was my suggestion, but part of the reason it's done on Tuesday morning is we're not *suppose* to leave our machines on over the weekends or at night. Many of us do because we know, for some reason, the scan starts at 1AM, so If you come in later on Tuesday the scan might finish between 2 and 3 PM and for a few hours in the afternoon you might be able to get something done. If you leave your machine off and the scan starts at say 7 or 8 AM when you turn the machine on, your day is completely wasted.
"There was never a good reason to use McAfee or Norton. Not even in dial-up days when you'd buy software boxed. In those days Panda was available and way less of a nightmare than the competition."
Nonsense, youngster.
What happened to McAfee was the same thing that happened to Norton. When Peter Norton was running Norton Utilities, it was among the greatest software around. It started to suck less than a year after his company was bought out by Symantec.
McAfee used to be a great product. It began to suck soon after the company was acquired by Intel.
Both founders have stated they were glad to be as distanced from the "modern" product as possible.
Qualifier: you may not have liked McAfee even in the beginning, but lots of people did. Probably what killed it was all the default installations that people didn't want.
Norton, on the other hand, was ground-breaking in its day.
Also, I might add: one of the reasons people disliked anti-virus software so much was that they used it wrong. They'd have 4 different utilities running in the background all the time, killing performance. In reality, it was almost always fine to run it manually once a week, or scheduled for 3:00 a.m., and disabling all the background crap.
I remember when the company I was working for at the time (in the top 5 Global 500 co.) upgraded the Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition scanning engine (from 5 to 6 IIRC). It was back around 2005. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth that month. It instantaneously transformed Pentium class machines into 386DX boxes and the villagers were grabbing their pitchforks.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
It's actually useful on file servers, as it can sometimes detect malware that attacks other platforms that got persisted to a share.
Norton Utilities was amazing at the time. I remember using his disk sector editor to find the sectors of a friend's thesis (only copy of course) and rebuild the FAT for the floppy so she could copy her thesis to another disk. The tools were just so well done.
I also learned the bigger part of x86 assembly from Peter Norton's book. It had fantastic examples - like building a basic disk sector editor. Ah, here it is:
http://www.amazon.com/Peter-Nortons-Assembly-Language-Book/dp/0136619010
I know what I am doing and I am a senior tech
Unless things radically changed the McAfee scanner still runs even with their uninstaller if you use a process monitor from sysinternals. The dll files are replaced after an install that can't ne undone even with a restore
http://saveie6.com/
McAfee may not be what I'd recommend for home use, but I would for enterprise.
Not if you need support. I have heard enough swearing over their incompetent support (one main reason we ditched them), and I have experienced it first hand. We had a virus that had disabled the virus scanner, so our people were busy reimaging PCs. We sent a VM with the problem to McAfee. After two weeks (yes, two weeks), they asked what hypervisor it was on... I ended up identifying the problem and a fix.
Should I mention the false positive that took down all XP machines?
Not for our enterprise, that's for sure.
Our company just shut down the last EPO server. Smiles all around.
I always thought that McAfee was a marvelous virus stopper!
McAfee did it by the excellent and novel way of using up all the available CPU cycles which neatly prevents viruses from working at all! Never any risks!
And it was smart enough to scale if you added more CPU or RAM. Furthermore it actually prevented viruses from reaching your system by gobbling up all the available network bandwidth as well!
All praise Intel!
Ernest J.W. ter Kuile
And you don't know how many times I've had to deal with an infected PC that was "protected" by some trialware version of Norton or McCrappie from 7-9 years ago. People got trained by al the trialware to just click "no" or "cancel" that they never bothered to read it and then were shocked, shocked I tell you, when their PC became so infected I had to nuke from orbit. Back then we gave folks AVG and now I give them Avast or Comodo IS depending on their skill level but we always avoided Norton and mcCrappie like the clap, worse on any PC than the bugs we'd always say.
I still don't know why Intel bought that garbage but if it means mcCrappie is gonna be bundled with Intel PCs? One more reason to buy AMD I guess.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I still don't know why Intel bought that garbage but if it means mcCrappie is gonna be bundled with Intel PCs? One more reason to buy AMD I guess.
or mac. I've never had a virus and the OS has a blacklist built-in that's updated and pushed out daily by apple. queue the "macs haz virors!" but the fact that each instance makes the /. front page says how rare it is.
God I remember all the Norton Internet Security 2004 installs that would bork in the firewall and take down the entire network connection. I hate them for buying Sygate and locking it up but I am sure not going to miss that headache.
Goddammit just when I get my first +5 the Beta rolls out and kills everything