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Technology

Technology

Latest developments and curiosities in the world of technology

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Posted bydonnaquixotein/technology-Jan 27 at 12:21 PMΔ

It might be time to stop using antivirus

It might be time to stop using antivirus

Former Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan, now a free agent and safe from the PR tentacles of his corporate overlord, says that antivirus software is terrible, AV vendors are terrible, and that you should uninstall your antivirus software immediately-unless you use Microsoft's Windows Defender, which is apparently okay.

arstechnica.com
Comments9
  • TryJan 27 at 2:19 PM

    The thing that stopped infections on my loved ones machines was an ad blocker. The content industry can cry all it wants but their content is not so great that it's worth all that. If you have content and want to push ads you can't afford to take a hands off approach. Bad ads are relevant to no one and they devalue your revenue stream.

    • RedAntisocialJan 27 at 10:32 PM

      Agreed about curating and handling your ads. Content creators absolutely deserve to get paid for their work, and ads are one of the easiest and most effective ways of doing that with web-based content, but you can't take a hands-off approach.

      The worst culprits are the listicle sites, that just dump garbage "articles" along the lines of "you'll never believe #7/what they look like now/etc.". But some of the large news sites aren't much better.

      There are sites, like penny-arcade.com and such that I know curate their own ads, because they don't want that crap associated with their brand. I intentionally whitelist them on my ad-blocker.

  • bluedepthJan 27 at 2:59 PM

    I read the article and my first instinct was to take exception to the message, that antivirus technology is still really important in the small business space. I have users who sometimes slip up, they click on attachments or assert that the sender of phishing emails would never cheat them or send them anything bogus. And while the detection rates are few and far between, having something like Symantec Endpoint Protection still has value to some of us. I admit that SEP has more faith than substance, but in that faith is couched the hope that even if SEP doesn't catch a nasty infection it might help slow it down.

    But then it was arstechnica, which is a valuable news source for people in IT, but for average users, the group that I'm actually concerned about getting this sort of statement and trying to find a way to turn off their copy of SEP, they would never read it. So for the people in IT who don't have to be told constantly about attachments, phishing attacks, or use heterogenous computing (Linux and Mac), yeah, that's fine.

    Just be careful what you tell the Eloi.

    • donnaquixoteJan 27 at 4:21 PM

      Good point.

  • XiofettJan 30 at 4:59 PM

    Unfortunately you can't just abandon AV in the enterprise if you have to deal with auditors. Gotta have something in that checkbox.

    We've had much more success in thwarting malware by locking down what files are passed through our O365 system. I get to try to evaluate our current AV solution (Trend Micro) to see if our implementation is just shit or if we'd be better off switching to something else.

    • donnaquixoteJan 30 at 6:35 PM

      Interesting point about auditors. Hadn't thought about that.

  • Rum_RunnerJan 27 at 8:36 PM

    AV is pretty much useless on Android anyway.

  • RedAntisocialJan 27 at 1:05 PM

    I haven't used one in years. Mind you, I primarily use Linux and MacOS, so viruses are less common, but I also employ fairly safe user habits.

    • SaerynJan 27 at 1:25 PM

      Agreed, I do use defender and as a general connected analyzer it can find known patterns. I don't count on it but I know any older stuff is taken care of and 0 day is 100% behavior anyhow.

Technology

Technology

Latest developments and curiosities in the world of technology

19786 members
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