McAfee, Symantec Think Vista Unfair 424
davidwr writes "Is Microsoft unfairly locking anti-virus companies out of Vista? Symantec and McAfee seem to think so and they aren't being very quiet about it, placing a full-page ad in the Financial Times. If you've found the ad online, please post a link."
Mcaffe + Norton Licks balls. (Score:0, Interesting)
Too complex for consumers, too bloated for computers, too un-reliable to be usefull. I prefer Avast! for my customers, and not just because it's free.
Why is Trend-Micro different? (Score:4, Interesting)
Trend Micro is the only (AFAIK) vendor that is certified to produce an anti-virus product for Vista. [trendbeta.com] Are they being given the keys to the castle while McAfee and Symantec are left out in the cold?
Anyone know why this is so? Do tell!
No love lost for both of them (Score:5, Interesting)
Shoulda broke them up long ago (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:McAfee, Symantec living on borrowed time (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:McAfee, Symantec living on borrowed time (Score:3, Interesting)
And striping drives won't help fight off malware, that's for redundancy and performance. And frequent ghosts aren't the answer either. I would recommend users backup data and not installations or partitions. You can be backing up an already corrupt/infected system.
It amazes me how little people are willing to pay for their computer. Its easily a gigantic part of many people's lives, however, they'd rather spend more on their dishware and drapes than they would on the thing that they use to do just about everything including personal banking.
Mcaffee and Symantec are important to the security industry, and help drive it. MS would be stupid to squeeze them out. Every computer should have a reputable company's security software installed or their ISP shouldn't allow them on the internet. Kinda like how cars need to be insured. The thing is, however, they should have the choice of what security company they trust.
Re:McAfee, Symantec living on borrowed time (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree with parent. Have we REALLY forgotten our IE/Netscape history so quickly? Microsoft is following their exact same vendor lock-in strategy now as they did then. Integrate the new product with the old and to make matters worse they're doing that instead of 'fixing' the original product (namely windows).
I'll be the first to say that XP was a huge improvement and that worm-spread was much reduced. I'll also say that I'm a developer myself and I understand that saying 'write it securely' is a hell of a lot easier than actually doing it. So, lets give MS the benefit of the doubt and presume that they're writing their OS even more securely than before. What are we left with, then? A very expensive to write program integrated with the OS for free. I'll again point out my parallel with IE, which was also a very expensive to write program integrated with the OS for free.
Now maybe I'm mistaken in my understanding that the anti-virus software is part of the default installation and if it is, my argument is admittedly all shot to hell and that Symantec and McAfee are big cry-babies. Given Microsoft's history, however, I doubt it.
Security in a reasonable OS can't be perfect (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No, that's not correct (Score:4, Interesting)
I really hate this popular Slashdot myth that viruses only exist because OSes are designed improperly. No, wrong.
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This is why SELinux [nsa.gov] and App Armor [novell.com] exist. With a proper SELinux or App Armor setup you could install Apache as root and all it will be allowed to do is what Apache does normally. So, it would only be allowed to read the
Admittedly this example wouldn't help a desktop user. But, there is no reason why SELinux or App Armor couldn't help a desktop user. One example would be if Firefox was locked down to only allow downloads to the ~/Downloads directory or something like that. Now any hole in firefox would only be able to damage your ~/Downloads directory and presumably your firefox cache directory or something. It wouldn't be able to delete ~/Pictures and ~/Music. The browser example is kind of complicated because it has so many tasks these days. But, the point is that you can prevent a lot of problems by employing some kind of mandatory access control system.
Oh, and it really isn't that hard to use one of these systems either. Yeah, they can be pretty nasty if you really get into it (especially SELinux). But, for a desktop user there really isn't anything to worry about. I use Fedora Core 5 at work and at home and I've kept SELinux enabled on both systems. App Armor is really nice to use for the purposes of locking down a server system in this way. SELinux is more generic but it is much more complex than App Armor.
Symantec bitches... (Score:3, Interesting)
Symantec and McAfee are only bitching because their shitty, shitty, shitty products are heavily tied into the old system by way of layer upon layer of cruft, which they don't particularly want to dig through. If Trend can do it, so can they; they just don't want to.
Re:McAfee, Symantec living on borrowed time (Score:3, Interesting)
Good point. And we might generalize it a bit. We often read here that old canard "You get what you pay for". With software, not only is this not generally true; what's more common is that with software, price and quality are typically inversely related.
Microsoft is merely doing its part to maintain this situation. They do it in a somewhat subtle way: They pretend that much of it is free, but you do in fact pay for IE and for MS's anti-virus software, as part of the price for their entire "system". You get crappy, poorly-functioning software, of course, in agreement with the price-quality rule. If you want quality, you have to download and install either shareware or free software.
Actually, there is somewhat of a parallel for this outside of computers. It's well known that, if you want quality audio or video equipment, you don't buy the all-in-one "systems". Those are simple purchases, and the components do work together (and are typically integrated into one box so that they appear to be a single product). But to get quality, you have to buy individual components, and interconnect them yourself. This takes time for study and wiring, but the end result will be much better quality.
Microsoft systems are like this. They sell as a "system", but the overall quality is low, especially since the components generally don't inter-operate nearly as well as advertised. Like A/V equipment, if you want quality, you'll just have to spend the time to install the quality components yourself.
The difference is that, with quality A/V equipment, the good stuff usually costs more than the crappy "integrated system" box. With software, the good stuff is usually a lot cheaper than the integrated junk. And when you look at all the hair-pulling and time-wasting futzing you've gotta do with MS software, the "component" software is often easier to get running right. So with both price and time, the quality stuff is cheaper than an all-in-one "system".
But with software, nobody much knows how to make things interoperate well.