Re: Antivirus vendor conspiracy theories

[Mike Smith <jmikesmith () yahoo com>]

 --- MHawkins () TULLIB COM wrote: 
> Antivirus vendors have painted themselves into their own conspiracy theoried
> corner by purveying a product that is based on technology that is purely
> reactive and for the last ten years they've use one method of protection
> thereby enabling other attack vectors to be repeatedly successful. 
>
> To use your own analogies, there is nothing proactive about locking a door
> after you've been broken into, there is nothing proactive to driving slower
> in the snow after you've already ended up in a ditch, and there's nothing
> proactive about remembering to gas up the generator after the power blinks
> off. Yet, that is what antivirus vendors are selling to the consumer and
> they're marketing spin tells the average joe "install this product and
> protect yourself from dangerous Internet viruses, worms etc" while year
> after year major infections spread and the consumer, faced with the
> cognitive dissonance between antivirus vendor marketing spin and the reality
> of a system rebuild, crashes, deleted files etc, wakes up and realizes that
> the antivirus vendors are peddling an awful product that really doesn't
> protect their system at all.
I think this strays a bit from the original point, which was that anti-virus
vendors benefit from an environment with many viruses and are perceived by some
to have an incentive to increase the number of viruses.  I think this perceived
incentive would apply to any manufacturer of a reactive product.  If global
warming reduces the areas where snow falls, snow tire makers will suffer
financially.  If power system become more reliable, generator makers will
suffer financially (their sales in particular skyrocket after major outages
like the one last year).  If humanity develops a universal respect for property
rights, alarm system makers will suffer financially.  From this, it could be
argued that these companies benefit from the existence of Bad Things and would
benefit more if there were more Bad Things.  Does that mean we perceive they
might be trying to increase the number of Bad Things?

To return to your points, the countermeasures you suggest above (locking the
door, driving more slowly, putting gas in the generator) are, you will notice,
all owner behaviours.  There is nothing the products can do, automagically, to
prevent the Bad Things from happening.  They require proper configuration
(e.g., locked, fuelled) and use (e.g., driving slowly).

Anti-virus products, in my personal experience, work just fine if you use them
properly and if you use your computer properly (e.g., don't open attachments
from strangers).  In 15 years, I've never been infected when I had a basic
freeware personal firewall and anti-virus combination.

=====
Mike Smith

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
                        H.G. Wells - The Outline of History

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