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A comment on Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus. Parent comment

Re:Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus by wyday on Sunday July 05, 2009 @12:10PM (#688361)
Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives. This is a very bad thing for small companies releasing desktop software.

Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.

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Re:Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus by michaelawill on Sunday July 05, 2009 @01:43PM (#688481)
People test antivirus software by throwing a certain number of virii at it and seeing what percentage of those are detected. This is their detection rate.

Just because Antivirus A detects 99% and Antivirus B detects 85% does not mean users of Antivirus A can expect more false positives. If anything, the better designed software should yield less.

Also: Yes, I have used endpoint protection. It's forced onto my work laptop at the office. It has a tendency to KILL my systems performance randomly, even when not performing a scheduled scan. 8mb of ram, while impressive for a symantec process, is simply an arbitrary number if any type of disk access gets slowed down by the service.

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Re:Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus by MoeDrippins on Sunday July 05, 2009 @01:00PM (#688423)
> Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives.

Awesome, so the machine I have with NO AV software at all with a detection rate of 0 must be the bestest!

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Re:Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus by wyday on Sunday July 05, 2009 @01:03PM (#688426)
That's obviously not what I meant. Read my comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=688388
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Re:Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus by mahmud on Sunday July 05, 2009 @12:22PM (#688368)
It uses 6 megabytes of memory

1) That's just the loader; it forks other crap.

2) I wouldn't be surprised if Symantec was hooking the OS API to report smaller footprint or gaming the profiling infrastructure in another way. Crap like that has been going on since the 80s.

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Re:Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus by wyday on Sunday July 05, 2009 @12:40PM (#688387)
You're right, it forks a couple more processes. It comes to a total of 8 megs, not 6. I should've checked that the first time.

Still pretty tiny.

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Re:Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus by SwellJoe on Sunday July 05, 2009 @12:42PM (#688388)
Higher detection rates just means more false positives.

Or better detection of viruses.

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Re:Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus by wyday on Sunday July 05, 2009 @12:48PM (#688397)
Ideally, yes. And that's certainly how companies are marketing their free AVs. The reality is that before we started signing all of our software, the free AVs detected it as a virus.

It's bad for business when you have to defend your product as not a virus (on top of trying to sell it!)

I wrote about it 2 years ago: http://wyday.com/blog/2007/useful-instantupdate-feedback/

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