Sometimes I wonder about these daily updates issued by most antivirus vendors.
How possible is it that most antivirus vendors only issue protection from new threats once a week and spend the rest of the week issuing fixes for all the false positives from them?
The attitude of the antivirus vendors is that a false positive is better than a false negative, and to a certain degree I would have to agree with them on that, but when a certain particular antivirus has a track record of more false positives than just about any other and it's a big name that is trusted & used by so many, it creates a situation where users believe the alerts and it can ruin a coder's reputation in a single day, especially a young one that hasn't released much yet.
About 3 years ago, a kid from my chatroom that was just learning C created a
really cool little utility and I released it on my group's site. There was nothing wrong with it...it was clean.
About a week later, people came flooding into the chatroom accusing my group of releasing malware, and this kid in particular. All of them had something in common...they were all McAfee users.
I sent a copy of the file to McAfee,
along with the source, and never heard from them about it beyond an email confirming that I had sent them the file and that they would look into it.
This kid had no idea what in his code could have set off the false positive so he had no idea how to fix it. What ended up happening is another member of my group created their own version of the utility, an
almost clone of the original, and we replaced the one on the site with that one. Sad, really, because to this day I feel the original is the better version. I wish I could have left the original on the site, but McAfee doesn't care about fixing their crap to protect the reputation of an unknown beginning coder.
Mouser, consider yourself lucky that they responded and issued any kind of fix at all. It means they think you are important enough to the world of software to do so. If you were a complete unknown and LBC was your first release, you'd be waiting a long long time.
