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Re: [LUG] AVG replacement

 

David Bell wrote:
>> Was looking for that as well. In googling came across www.free-av.com
>> (avira). Was recommended in pcpro
> 
> ClamAV ?  It's cross platform.

Alas, it doesn't do access testing as far as I know. (Ie, running all 
the time and checking files as they are read, which is an essential 
method for internet connect winboxes)

AVG has definately gone downhill with the latest version. The fuss on 
The Register about it checking all links is a serious negative imo (Open 
a page on Google and it will download every link in the background to 
check for malicious pages - making webstats and some forms of 
advertising pointless. Bandwidth quotas beware!), as well as it forcing 
an addon in IE and FF. The final nail for me was that it asked if it 
could install Yahoo Toolbar, which has had numerous allegations of being 
spyware itself as well as being adware rubbish. So useful that Yahoo pay 
software vendors to include it with their products.

(I do, of course, appreciate AVG need to pay the bills, but their chosen 
approach is awful. "Nanny knows best, now shut up and eat your spyware.")

I switched from that to Avira which is also not perfect. It throws up an 
annoying advert screen once a day and completely missed a very nasty 
virus on my system (In mitigation, the db was 2 days old and when 
updated it found it - but by then too late). I think it's better than 
AVG though. I have tried Avast but I forget why I didn't like it now. :(

Maybe I'm expecting too much for free products, but when I look at 
Spamassassin and the amazing stuff that can do, and the hugely useful 
third party rulesets for it, I'm sad there isn't a Windows on-access 
scanner that's truly free and without intrusive measures (unless 
somebody knows different!). I guess that's mostly because it's a lot 
more difficult to reliably get detection signatures for viruses and 
trojans than for spam, and maybe that people who volunteer their coding 
services really don't want to endure the pain that is low-level windows 
programming.

Of course, I use clamav on my mail server which stops the email bourne 
stuff very well, but with the huge increase in drive-by website 
infections email's no longer the main source of nasties.

-- 
Simon Avery

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