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The DonationCoder "Superior Antivirus" Award/Certification

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nudone:
would be nice of an open source project managed to complete the task.

barney:
Just ran across this thread.  Interesting concept.

'Fraid it would be useless to some of the folk I know, though, for purely physical reasons.  They are touch typists.

Problem I've had with every AV I've used is that a warning window with a default action pops up and steals focus when the AV thinks it's found something.  If I happen to be typing notes I've made into an editor, or perhaps copying a bit of PHP out of a book, I'm not looking at the screen.  Even with an audible alert, I'll probably hit a hotkey or enter before I can stop typing & check the monitor to see what just beeped.  Even if I am looking at the monitor, I may not be able to stop typing before I've dismissed the warning.

When that happens, I've just initiated whatever default action the AV uses upon I know not what file.  [Sidebar.  Have you ever quarantined/deleted a kernel file?  It's fun.]

So, as long as the AV steals focus, any information it provides is frequently going to be useless.  That said, the information would indeed be useful during, say, an intentional scan, or maybe during boot-up.

mouser:
barney, i think thats a really good point -- maybe we can add to the list that the alert cannot be accidentally triggered by a keyboard press.
there should be no way to accidentally hit a key to have some action take place.  maybe a time delay before it responds.

barney:
Actually, that one's pretty simple. 

Make certain no button has focus or can be triggered with a single key press, i.e., Quarantine would be Alt-Q, not just Q.  Alternatively, make the default button perform no action, let it be a dummy. 

The alternative is chancy, since the keyboard folk will wanna be able to tab to the button of their choice, so inadvertent action is still a possibility.

Don't think time delay would work unless there's some way to circumvent if the wrong action is taken.

There was something I used in Linux, don't remember what, that would pop up a window on top of all others, but did not steal focus from whatever was being done.  It got your attention when you looked at the screen, but let you keep doing what you had been doing ... kinda weird, looking at a top-level window, but still typing into the window below it.

Maybe that could be done ... not that I'd expect the AV folk to buy it, but, still ...

mwb1100:
The focus-stealing problem can be solved by having the notification take the form of 'toast' popups (I'm not sure what the official name of this UI element is).  The notification is visible, and I can interact with  it if I like, but it doesn't steal focus from what I'm currently working on.

Outpost Firewall notifications do this for me today.

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