Aaaaaaaaargh!
If I'd read Luther's reply to Kurt earlier I could have saved myself a
message!
 > How do you know any given identification is exact ?  YOU DON'T!  ALL you
 > know is what the scanner tells you!  If Dr. Solomon says you have
 > One.Two.Three(a) how do you know your virus isn't really One.Two.Three(b)
 > or any of the other 350 variants ?  YOU DON'T!  In fact you don't even
 > know for sure that it's a virus!  ALL YOU KNOW IS WHAT THE SCANNER TELLS
 > YOU!
Yep ... right or wrong, that's ALL you know ... and the average guy in
the street has no way of checking the accuracy of the information.
 > Have you ever noticed that the only people who stress the "importance"
 > of "exact identification" are the anti-virus companies who claim to have
 > more of it than the next guy ?  Nobody else gives a fuck about it as
 > long as their scanners can clean up the mess.  Like Rod said, it's a
 > buzz-word for techno-wankers, worth about as much in real life as
 > reverse-fucking-piggybacking!
IMO, touting one scanner as "better" than another simply because it
accurately names (or purports to accurately name) more viruses _is_
a technowank ... but it's gotta be worth a lot more than "inverse
piggybacking".  :)
 > It's a fucking long time since Bontchev was independent.  It was obvious
 > long before he joined Frisk that he was paving his way for the job.
 > Everything he said was "F-Prot, F-Prot, F-Prot", even though F-Prot has
 > NEVER been #1 in a serious comparison.  Dark Avenger predicted Bontchev
 > would join Frisk, by the way.
Yep ... anyone who could read between the lines knew which way Vesselin
was heading.  (Business is business.)  :)
Jimmy Kuo (McAfee) raised a valid point in a.c.v a few days ago when he
said _no_ AV product tests are 100% independent.
If you think about this carefully, he's 99% right.  For example: even
though I take every possible precaution to ensure that my own testing
is fair to everyone, my tests would be slightly skewed in favor of AVP
and TBAV because, between the two of them, they have all my viruses.
(Other AV companies can get these viruses through the CARO grapevine,
but _I_ don't give viruses to anyone except Eugene and Frans.)
It's often said that magazines give "Editor's Choice" awards to those
AV companies with the biggest ads.  Although it sometimes looks that
way I'd hate to think that this is really happening, but even ignoring
this aspect, IMO most magazine tests aren't worth the paper they're
written on by virtue of the fact that they're written by geeks!
I personally know of only ONE computer journalist who has even the
faintest clue about viruses.  He has a collection of many thousands of
viruses and usually runs his tests on several hundred, which puts him
way out in front of that PC World geek who did an internationally
published "antivirus product review" last year using only SIX viruses!
(The same PC World geek canned ThunderByte for Windows95 "because it
used heuristic cleaning rather than positive identification" ... back in
the days when TBAV for Windows95 had NO cleaning functions AT ALL!  So
much for _his_ credibility!)
Jimmy _is_ 99% right ... if you pull _most_ "independent" AV tests apart
you'll find _some_ bias (in PC magazine tests you'll often find blatant
lies and outright stupidity as well!) ... although now that Dr Solomon's
no longer have a financial interest in Secure Computing the Urban Myth
that "Solly always wins because Solly owns the magazine and Solly
provides all the viruses" carries a lot less weight.
---
---------------