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To: piytar
Ad-Aware is worthless. It is Swedish and owned by, I think, Norman ASA, both of which need to be avoided like the plague, for two reasons: 1, no good for detection - this is a 35th-rate outfit. 2, Antisemitic and pro-jihad company culture and a history of, well, like the Beagle Boys, in the case of Norman. Try and guess the number of actual criminals connected with the company - 0,1,2,3,4...

Generally, when AV-companies shows you tests (100% detection and so on), the test is fraudulent. That is because these tests are done against a small subset of viruses known as the wildlist. Compiling the wildlist is a small number of AV people and cronies. The problem with that is that the wildlist is a very small percentage of what is known to be in the wild.

What is known to be in the wild is collected by a couple of companies who, in practice, solicits new viruses. *That* list stands at several million. And those companies, like the subset-keepers, are paid by the AV-companies. At least, that was how things worked not very long ago, been a few months since I actually took that stuff apart.

If you deal with the AV establishment (like Trend, K7, Symantec, Norman and so on), there's a fairly high chance that you're being ripped off, contribute to very bad actors, or both.

6 posted on 12/06/2010 9:54:14 AM PST by Hardraade (I want gigaton warheads now!!)
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To: Hardraade

By the way, IIR, Ad-Aware is owned by a company called ‘Lavasoft’. I used to have that (actually a paid subscription) but it ran out and they never even emailed me to solicit renewal or acknowledged me as a customer. This was a couple of years ago. It was odd, and made me suspicious of what kind of company it is. So I forgot about it.


13 posted on 12/06/2010 10:18:31 AM PST by Lancey Howard
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