Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

How's *that* for a false positive? And is it? (Avira AV)

<< < (2/4) > >>

rgdot:
Agreed mouser. It is so bad that I don't remember the last time I saw any alert that didn't have gen or generic in it.

f0dder:
At least UAC gives you a clear indication that an application is trying to access locations that most applications shouldn't - with the amount of false positives AV products throw, all bets are off.

tranglos:
At least UAC gives you a clear indication that an application is trying to access locations that most applications shouldn't - with the amount of false positives AV products throw, all bets are off.
-f0dder (December 01, 2009, 01:46 AM)
--- End quote ---

f0dder, it seems there is no way we are ever going to agree on this.

Every UAC notification is a false positive by design, because UAC doesn't know that the application is trying to do anything untoward, so it warns about practically all of them. AV software at least tries to detect actual harm.

I'll take a false positive from AV software once a week or so(*) - though I do agree they are insidious and cause grief to upstanding developers. But so does UAC.

That said, the only actual benefit I got from running AV since I recall has been limited to stopping trojans on other people's pendrives, or my own after I'd taken them to a printing shop. (I have yet to see a printing shop with an uninfected computer.) I disable autorun as a rule, but at least once I've realized it was enabled for USB drives while I wasn't aware of that. Whether this is sufficient pay-off for the performance penalty associated with real-time protection and 60+ MB memory use, I honestly don't know. There should be a better way - like me being still more diligent about disabling autorun for all removable drives.

(*) Though it's more like once a month for me.

f0dder:
You don't get UAC prompts from software that's properly programmed :)

Unfortunately there's still a lot of software that isn't, because MS made the bad decision to make the default NT account administrator (started to become a problem with Win2k which had some mainstream usage, and especially once XP was introduced) - and of course for Win9x being a total p.o.s. without a concept of security.

At least Vista and the UAC popups are now forcing developers to look at their crappy code and do things properly... as well as providing security ;)

Innuendo:
I'll take a false positive from AV software once a week or so(*) - though I do agree they are insidious and cause grief to upstanding developers. But so does UAC.-tranglos (December 01, 2009, 02:13 AM)
--- End quote ---

I see a false positive from my AV maybe once a month. However, that's also the frequency I see UAC prompts as well.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page