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Friday, November 10, 2006

Dead Snake Oil Salesmen Walking...

Symantec and McAfee have been whining in EU courts and more than a few other places about Microsoft Vista's security protections making it hard for them to produce their anti-virus software. Poor saps, their chickens are coming home to roost...

The concept of antivirus software is inherently flawed. Antivirus software can never keep up with the latest virus. There are far better ways of protecting a system than detecting known virus signatures.

Execution protection, user permission controls and good firewalling are far more effective methods of defending against such attacks. All of these things are built into Vista, and in fact are most of what is new that is in Vista-- showing Microsoft "gets it" at least regarding this sort of security. Even on Windows 2000 or Windows XP, all of these things are available (though not built-in) except useful user permission controls.

Even before this latest Vista whine-song, Symantec and McAfee have been going into FUD PR mode in order to try to save their market-- their latest conflict of interest due to the fact that they are mostly out of business if the above facts about effective virus protection gets out. They're dead men walking, having painted themselves into a corner and now they're whining about it. Simply pathetic.