Joined: 3/14/2008
Posts: 152
Location: United Kingdom
superjupi wrote:
Duksandfish wrote:
McAfee Security center!
I pray that is sarcasm. That thing once auto-deleted my data structures homework, insisting it was a virus. Didn't even ask for confirmation.
That'll teach me to ever run a new laptop with full bloatware ever again.
Nope, no Jokes, Mcafee is graet, i have used norton, avg and Mcafee, and i find it very good. It updates every other day, and automatically scans once a week. The ONLY bad thing is the firewall, which really sucks, but windows firewall is good enough.
First off, to those using software firewalls...they suck. Get yourself a hardware one.
What good is a hardware firewall? They only stop inbound attacks, something a software firewall can do as well.
The largest problem are not inbound attacks. I don't have hard numbers, but I bet less than 0.1% of hacker problems is caused by hackers attacking from the outside and finding a security hole.
99.9% of hacking problems happen from the computer itself, in the form of spyware, trojans and backdoors. A hardware firewall is not going to stop those and, what is absolutely worse, they won't even inform you that something is connecting to the internet that shouldn't. A software firewall will. And that's the point: If it so happens that your system gets infected by a spyware you will *immediately* get notified of the fact when that spyware tries to contact the outside. You can stop it, and you can immediately run something to remove it. A hardware firewall is completely useless for this purpose.
Not having a software firewall in Windows is just madness. You are asking for trouble. Just running ad-aware or spybots S&D from time to time is not enough: By that time your computer may have already been compromised (and used eg. as a spam server).
Common sense wins over spyware detection software. Oh, I win a million dollars if I click this attachment? SCORE! ...wait, WHAT?!?!?!?! (I mean, honestly...how much spyware is caused by complete stupidity? Don't download unexpected attachments and get a fricken adblocker software for your firefox browser.)
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
After a few months testing it, I can now say that RegRun Security Suite Platinum is really a must have Windows protection tool. It has a bunch of nice features, like fixes for the dll redirection and removable devices autorun issues, plus rootkit detection and removal. Also, like the name says, it has a neat registry protection system... the best I've seen.
But it's not really recommended for the very very noobies... (though they can learn a lot)
Also, it's quite cheap (though I didn't pay but still... it's some pretty good crap.. the guys deserve some money)
and please quit babbling about avg/avast/crapersky... use anything but those.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
removable devices autorun issues
Unless you've drastically changed your setup, removable devices should never autorun. Even if you put an autorun.inf on the device, Windows/Linux will still ask you what to do or ignore it.
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
Also, it's quite cheap (though I didn't pay but still... it's some pretty good crap.. the guys deserve some money)
If the guys deserve some money, why do you pirate it and deprive them of the reward for the hard work they have done? Would you prefer we spend our money instead while you use your pirated copy?
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
Raiscan wrote:
Unless you've drastically changed your setup, removable devices should never autorun. Even if you put an autorun.inf on the device, Windows/Linux will still ask you what to do or ignore it.
No way. unless you disable it globally, the time you hook your removable device the autorun thing is executed. There's no way to avoid it (in win98 you could hold down shift... but I don't think this works for XP)
And my copy is not pirated! but the license...
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
It's nice that you didn't answer Raiscan's question about your conflicting actions and thoughts regarding piracy and how the authors deserve some compensation. Ignoring a question won't make it go away, you know.
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
mmbossman wrote:
It's nice that you didn't answer Raiscan's question about your conflicting actions and thoughts regarding piracy and how the authors deserve some compensation. Ignoring a question won't make it go away, you know.
Yeah, it will. In fact it's already gone.
You have 2 choices: to pay or not to pay. Software creators are aware of that. Pirated software is also free advertisement for the product. Most of my favourite programs came to me in warez form, and it's very unlikely that I'd know them through official means.
And I'd just start talking about how it's illegal to have ROMs and copyrighted mp3 in your hard drive, but let's just avoid hypocrisy, OK?
And Raiscan, when you say Windows asks what to do I get that it prompts you with that dialog where you select things like "browse with windows explorer", or "play in winamp". The autorun.inf is processed differently. You need to permanently disable autorun for that drive if you don't want it to execute stuff. And according to my experiences it works exactly the same for any removable media... no matter if it's CD or USB disk.
(This is a stupid feature anyway... I don't know why they kept it in vista).
And even if you can get rid of that, there's still the "desktop.ini + comment.htt" nasty combo, which automatically runs something when the folder is viewed in Windows Explorer (I don't think you're using Total Commander). --- note: it's being a whle since I don't see these... maybe they were pre-xp and are now extinct?
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
I have a hardware firewall, and do not bother with anti-virus at all on my laptop. My desktop still uses AVG, but mainly because it's already there and keeps up with updates, and because my desktop is DMZ.
Unfortunately, the only software firewall that impressed me (Sygate) was discontinued. It was the only software firewall I ever used that would halt the worm running around on Bellsouth a few years ago. Damnedest thing; on a fresh installation of XP, if I plugged the network cable in before installing Sygate, within ten minutes my CPU usage would max out and never go down. Ever. Nothing in the task manager using resources, just a rapidly overheating processor running under full load for no apparent reason. Only way to stop it would be to format, reinstall the OS, and install Sygate before getting on the network. Never did find out what it was, other than it only occurred on Bellsouth, and if I wasn't firewalled. Didn't even have to open a browser window, just being connected spelled certain doom. Oh well, no such troubles now.
Since that "few years ago" XP Service Pack 2 was released, and now you won't get swarmed with malware just by connecting to the Internet.
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
And I'd just start talking about how it's illegal to have ROMs and copyrighted mp3 in your hard drive, but let's just avoid hypocrisy, OK?
I never said I didn't have ROMs on my hard drive, but I also didn't blatantly say "This isn't a legal copy that I didn't want to pay for, but you really should!"
You have 2 choices: to pay or not to pay. Software creators are aware of that.
I believe that you pirating the program was not the actual objection. The objection was that you showed a great deal of hypocrisy by praising the program and telling how people should buy it because the authors deserve it, and in the same sentence, telling how you pirated it and didn't pay anything for it.
Pirated software is also free advertisement for the product.
That's just a lousy excuse to make yourself feel better about your pirating. "Ok, so I use pirated software. But it's not *all* that bad. Actually the authors benefit from software piracy because it's free advertisement for their products."
IMO you should cut the crap and be honest to yourself: Pirating commercial software is *not* a good thing for the creators of that software in any way, and you are doing it solely because you don't care. No lousy excuses.
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
???
for some reason, I can't stop laughing...
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
OK, guys... Remember: I'm not the Ambassador of Piracy here or anything.
Let's quit this futile discussion, because from now on all this thread will get is "piracy is bad" or "ur a stupid lameass criminal".
The topic says "Antivirus suggestions" anyway.
EDIT:
mmbossman wrote:
You are starting to remind me a lot of nfq.
phew... I was pretty pissed off for a while... I thought you had written jxq.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
A lot of people say Norton is bad. I agree it's not the best, but based on my experiences with it I would not say it's bad at all. During the years I have used it, not a single issue has come up. No Trojan or whatever causing issues or anything of the sort (To my knowledge). The full scans take a while, but I just do them when I'm away, not that it demands much to run. Numerous hack attempts, and to my knowledge none got through. It's a simple program that takes care of all this without my needing to update 5 different programs that focus on one thing...
Mind you I've only been paying for the service a little while, but I'll see how much it costs to renew the subscription. I'd suggest anyone looking for Antivirus suggestions not listen to all this, I very well may toss Norton soon, it largely depends on the subscription update fee...
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
Yeah, I never used Norton, but I have never heard anything special about it... neither bad nor good. I guess it's just OK.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
MrSparkle wrote:
A lot of people say Norton is bad.
It depends on the user. Personally, I found it to be slow, take up unnecessary resources and (the most important thing) it gives very little trust to the user. In older versions you could disable antivirus etc. and even get rid of the taskbar stuff. This is my ideal level of control.
In the last version I tried, you could only disable things for a certain amount of time before they turned on again. Even worse, short of terminating the damn thing from Task Manager it insisted on staying not only in the System Tray but immediately to the left of it as well, with the occasional massive toast box coming up telling me I have things disabled like I'm some sort of idiot. It effectively seized control of MY computer and refused to let me do things I wanted to do.
Now I use Avast. It can be disabled, it can be as unintrusive as you want it to be simply by going into it's settings and it's free if you're a home user. Legally free isn't always bad, you know.
Oh, and I've never had a false positive from it. I cannot say the same for AVG and Norton.
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
Tub wrote:
still, relying on antivir-software is like protecting your home against burglars by installing spring guns in your living room.
Not quite. It's kinda hard to tell if a virus is a virus until it's already downloaded. It's more like having a doorman that checks everything that comes in and stops it when it recognises someone whos a burglar or notices someone trying to install a spycamera in that precious clock on your mantlepiece.
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
Joined: 3/14/2008
Posts: 152
Location: United Kingdom
My laptop got a virus on it yesterday, and as I don't use antivirus software, I was happy for three reasons:
1. I didn't get any malicious files on it for about 6 months
2. I needed a reason to do a clean install/sort out my partitions.
3. The stuff I needed to keep was less than 1gb so I just copied it onto my flash drive.
Joined: 4/25/2004
Posts: 615
Location: The Netherlands
My two cents...
If you're a techie and know what you're doing, don't open strange (porn or whatever) websites, email, MSN virii links (easily recognisable) and other spooky stuff, you don't _need_ any AV software. I don't run any and I've been fine for years. Heck, I'm only using the windows firewall and that's fine. In this case you should have a few tools handy in case something fishy starts happening (process explorer, portquery, etc) so you can immediately investigate (it's obviously not exactly the safest thing).
On the other hand, if you're not that great with recognizing these dangers, AV is recommended. Big time.
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
How do you know you're fine if you don't run AV software? And besides, sometimes theres files or information that are required on the dark side of the internet.
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
