...While MSE is still my favorite, it's no angel. It FP'd on me a few weeks back on a copy of f0dder's FSekrit I'd been using for years on 5 different machines.
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-Stoic Joker
Oh yes, and MSE does occasionally give annoying false positives on stuff that one has had on one's PCs for years with no prior adverse report from MSE. The workaround is to tell MSE that that particular file is an
Allowed item.
My experience is that MSE gives fewer false positives than most of the other AV packages I have used.
I had put that down to the MSE developers possibly doing a more thorough job of virus signature detection than the developers of other AV software.
All this
"Oh noes! The sky is falling!" and running around frantically every time there's a false positive on a downloadable software is both unproductive and time-wasting, and it puts the onus on the
developer to jump through bureaucratic hoops to lodge an
appeal against the false (in error) AV verdict.
What ruddy cheek! No,
the responsibility more correctly lies with the AV developer to ensure that they only release bug-free, tested AV products in the first place. That testing won't exactly be rocket science, and they should have a suitably-designed testing regime for it. It will therefore probably be a semi-automated, defined process and one which will be operating in
statistical control, so they will be able to distinguish between constant cause errors and special cause errors, and thus be able to predict the former with differing levels of confidence, and mitigate against those particular risks. That's kinda like Statistics 101. As I said, it "..won't exactly be rocket science".
If they
don't take that responsibility, then they are effectively just distributing the AV software in a Beta state all the time, trusting to luck and expecting
the users to do their testing for them "in production", as it were.