full-disclosure - MS Anti Virus?

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Message-ID: <20040617094556.GB27478@ref.nmedia.net>
From: chris at nmedia.net (Chris Cappuccio)
Subject: MS Anti Virus?

Todd Burroughs [todd@...topia.com] wrote:
> They are planning to get into a market that gaurds against the failures
> in their own product.  I don't like this, as it seems that they are going
> to be in a position to intentionally make holes that their "anti-virus"
> software will fix.  If we had a more competitive market in this type of

I hate to break it to you, but being the Monopoly, they've been in this
position since the days of MS-DOS.  The fix was always to buy the next version.
Of course, now we're talking about a more specific type of software bug than we
were before.  There's nothing new and exciting about Microsoft entering
the AV market, except, perhaps we may see software that is better than
some of the other spew out there.

Ok, that was phrased incorrectly.  I couldn't possibly feel _excited_ by this
new software from Microsoft.  That would be like rushing to McDonald's for a
salad-in-a-cup.  What I mean to say is that Microsoft seems to have an easy
time matching and exceeding the quality of many third parties (maybe since
everyone writes such shit software!)

> software there would be no market for AV software and the AV companies
> would be making better operating systems.  Remember, Microsoft is a
> marketing company and they are very good at it and very powerful.
> 

You would run an operating system written by Symantec? Commercial AV vendors
are the epitomy of junk software.  The thought just makes me cringe.  Better
operating systems? Better than what? 

> It's sad that we are wasting so much resources on what should be a
> non-problem.
> 

The fact that Microsoft has the monopoly reflects social and economic values,
not technical ones.  So, it's largely irrelevant to the thousands of people
who happily run other operating systems.  If it seems sad to you, then most of
the world probably makes you cry.   (Hey, that's OK, it gets to me from time
to time as well)

-c