Tell me something new re: M$.

MicroSith is still at it anyway.

Guest
Glad he is truly M$ free...

The only reason Symantec and McAfee and all the rest exist at all is because 95% of PCs run Windows and suffer from that OS's design flaws. Now that Microsoft is fixing (or attempting to fix) their OS, these "security" guys are getting all brown trousered worrying that Vista users might not have to spend $30 a year on third party protection programs - most of which are heavier and more intrusive than the malware they purport to defend against.

Symantec is leveraging its "grab it's own ankles position" to get [CENSORED]. Guest above is absolutely right. When you sell a product that fixes problems in another vendor's product, expect that one day (maybe 15 years later), that vendor might fix their product and your niche will dry up.

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Guest wrote:
The only reason Symantec and McAfee and all the rest exist at all is because 95% of PCs run Windows and suffer from that OS's design flaws. Now that Microsoft is fixing (or attempting to fix) their OS, these "security" guys are getting all brown trousered worrying that Vista users might not have to spend $30 a year on third party protection programs - most of which are heavier and more intrusive than the malware they purport to defend against.

If you read other articles that include the complaints lodged with the EU about Vista by Symantec and others, you might get a different picture. Symantec's complaint isn't necessarily that Vista will be free from viruses, but that Microsoft will have its own antivirus software that the OS may use preferentially. (They could even make it difficult for others to be installed or operate.) If you followed the US and EU antitrust actions against Microsoft, this might sound familiar--it was much the same tactic that Microsoft used against Netscape, for example. Microsoft has shown either an inability or unwillingness to learn from legal mistakes. That may have been, in part, because the current US administration backed down from the fines and other payments the previous administration had sought after Micorsoft was convicted of multiple antitrust violations. In the process, Microsoft was found to be an illegal monopoly. On the other hand, the EU has not been shy about imposing large penalties on Microsoft, to the tune of roughly $900 million--so far. It may go up even more if Microsoft doesn't meet the EU court's requirements.

A strong argument can be made that no matter how "preferential" Vista is to Microsoft's anti-virus software, it is not the same as what happened to Netscape. It is logical for anti-virus functionality to be built into the OS. Are Apple and Microsoft anti-competitive because they force their users to use their own windowing systems rather than those made by third parties? Of course not. In the Linux world you have a choice, but on Mac and Windows, that's just a vital part of the OS.

At this point, anti-virus software is vital on Windows.

I'm not saying I believe this to be true; I haven't read enough of the complaints to form a solid opinion one way or another. But there were many factors that made Microsoft's actions in the browser wars illegal, and people are very quick to liken those actions to others that are subtly but importantly different.

The Netscape/IE instance also had a lot to do with the "fate of the internet".

Remember that there was a standards war where netscape and IE both had different tags that the other couldn't render. While an HTML standards organization helped settle that down, Microsoft was still attempting to add proprietary HTML tags above and beyond the standard, while attempting to leverage ActiveX controls which were against proprietary.

With such a large segment of the market using Windows to browse the internet, and predatory actions that penalized licencees from installing competing browsers or internet services as an option, there was a very real risk that Microsoft could lock out the remaining computing alternatives by making most webpages usable only on Windows computers.

Needless to say, there's really no paralell to that level of risk with virus software. Even if Microsoft locks up the market on their own system, it dosen't prevent people from using a less-virus ridden computer (i.e. mac, unix, linux...)

Bleah: "AGAIN, proprietary", not "against proprietary". Active X controls only worked on Windows systems. So even Mac users with Internet Explorer couldn't interact with pages that had ActiveX features, like certain online banking sites.

Symantec is the Monopoly in the software utility market. Anytime a competitor threatens Symantec they just buy the company(desolve it) and late the software go to pot. Samples: Delrina(Winfax and ProComm), Powerquest (Drive Image/Partition Magic) and Quartedeck to name a few.

Put the marketing tatics aside.

Given that you have a trojan horse that came with a Word or Powerpoint file on your machine, if your AV vendor does not have Kernel priviliges, he'll probably A) not be able to see the trojan and B) not be able to remove it.

So the only people who can "help" you with the detection and removal are the Microsoft AV people (yes, the same guys who messed it up in the first place)

If Symantec asks for a way to stand on the same spot as MS and not to fight a security uphill battle that leaves their customers in a risk, then I tend to fully agree with them.

I rather have a choice of products, than a MS monopoly that will put development to a hold once the competition has given up (See IE history...)

Maxi

So Microsoft wants to cut off access to the Vista kernel?

I didn't think they could get any more incompetent than they already are, but there you go.

This means when malware inevitably breaks into the kernel, 3rd party anti-virus software will be utterly useless against it. Meaning the only defence is Microsoft's own anti-virus software, which let's face it, is gonna be next to useless by virtue of being engineered by Microsoft in the first place.

Not only is that absolutely monopolistic, but it makes Vista even more vulnerable. All in one fell swoop. Good work, Microsoft. Good work.

"A strong argument can be made that no matter how "preferential" Vista is to Microsoft's anti-virus software, it is not the same as what happened to Netscape."

It's exactly the same as what happened with Netscape, right down to the letter. That "strong argument" is a fallacy.

No matter how essential virus-protection is for Windows, nothing gives Microsoft the justification to prevent 3rd-party AV software from being able to protect Vista as effectively as their OWN AV software.

It doesn't matter if it's "built in" to Vista or not. It doesn't matter of it's a "security feature".

If you don't give 3rd parties access to the kernel, when their products REQUIRE it so they can function properly, yet you give yourself kernel access so YOUR competing product and yours alone can get the job done, that's monopolistic. Period. No excuses.