This blog is primarily concerned with NIS 2007 (and a bit on NIS 08). I have nothing to say about more recent versions.

This blog is more or less dormant (except for occasional comments on related news), and is being left on-line as a historical record and perhaps as a warning to future generations of anti-virus coders.

2008-07-22

Commenting policy change

Apparently this blog has caught the attention of Symantec. We are starting to see what are basically advertisements for NIS 09 Beta appear in the comment section. For that reason I am going to turn off anonymous commenting.

Apologies in advance for any slight inconvenience that this may cause.

5 comments:

Bonnie said...

Hello! I'm currently hating Nortons with a passion. It was just stealing about 99% of my broad-bandwidth and about 90% of my CPU without my permission to run unnamed-secret-background-business when, because I'm using Mozilla, it crashed out and closed down completely.

I've never had such a nice time using my PC as I've had in the past 10 minutes.

Can you recommend an alternative internet security system?

Anonymous said...

AVG was highly rated until they made a mistake recently. Now they have corrected that mistake and I assume they're good to go again.

Search my blog (top left corner) for AVG and then do you own research. I'm a bit nervous about making explicit recommendations.

One recommendation I can make is for you to do your own research to find an alternative.

AVAST is another possible option.

Adam said...

To be honest, they need to redesign their scanning engine from the GROUND UP to address the shittiness of the previous products. If they have the financial means to acquire other companies, they have the means to do a re-engineer based on all they learned from their previous flops.

I know I'm not alone when I allude to computers that have 9-minute startup times and performance (or lack thereof) that renders a computer COMPLETELY useless. Coincidentally--all of them have some form of Symantec virus scanning installed on them.

Or possibly the ever-smart version of Internet "Security" that allows ignorant users to block windows host processes and disable 100% of TCP/IP communication. Sweet. I guess it is safe now!!! Nevermind that I no longer have any internet...but hey, I'm virus free!

Finally, when trying to remove all the corrupted Symantec bullshit, it somehow corrupted its installation so badly that you CAN'T uninstall it anymore, nor can you disable the services since it set its own GODLY permissions and you can't get rid of without a great deal of patience. Forget the Windows installer cleanup utility as well, as the registry keys are in literally thousands of locations and will cause nothing but problems from the point of "removal" forward.

I HATE Symantec. They should do the world a favor and disappear; they aren't doing the world any favors by remaining alive.

Adam said...

Oh and if you're looking for a cheap and secure replacement for NIS and not just NAV, I would recommend AVG FREE and COMODO FREE firewall. These are perfect replacements with extremely low overhead. AVG Internet Security has caused problems in my experience, but I would still take it over Symantec any day.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your comments Adam. They reflect my experiences in spirit if not in quantity.

After I uninstalled NIS07 from my old XP desktop (using the Symantec Removal Tool), it still left about 80 registry remnants (according the CCleaner).

And my start-up times have not been quite as bad as 9 minutes, but I really do hate how Norton tends to barge onto the Internet connection in advance of letting the human check the damn news.

And their STUPID 46-file download algorithm just to CHECK for updates is moronic to the highest degree. My left big toe can program tighter code than that.

Checking for updates should simply send a 1kB summary in one direction or the other. The summary can be precalculated during periods of low CPU use (not that it should require more than a microsecond of CPU time anyway). Send the summary, compare, if different then investigate further.

It defies logic that it should take NIS 2 minutes to determine that it is already up-to-date.