AVG update gags iTunes A dodgy AVG update over the weekend left users with crippled iTunes installations. The faulty signature update meant iTunes.dll and iTunesRegistry.dll library files were falsely labelled as infected with the Small-BOG virus, and consigned into quarantine. As a result, AVG both prevented iTunes from working and the re- …
I don't use AVG anymore, kinda lost faith in it after the AVG8 debacle, but credit where it's due: I've reported false positives to them a few times, and they've always been very prompt to respond and fixed the problem within 24 hours, sometimes even the same day. Big thumbs up from me to them for customer service. Shame about the Nortonisation of their more recent products...
Dear AVG
Thank you for your valued service. Your virus detection program has been so powerful it amazed me.
Whilst working into the early hours of the morning over the weekend on an urgent development job, the need for caffeine kicked in. Having poured myself a fresh cup of 'joe', the next part of the routine was to stick on some tunes.
However, to my surprise I was instantly bombarded with alerts galore. Surely my beloved iTunes cannot be infected? I know I have been playing some bizarre music of late, and have been caught up like a lemming in the audible recollections of Michael Jackson's skilled career pre-kiddie-fiddling charges, but surely that was not enough of a viral stream to create these errors? I pondered, mused, attempted various restarts and uninstalls, all to no avail.
No, thought I. My beloved AVG would not lie to me. I must have suddenly been infected to the hilt by naughty worms and nasty trojans. Time to clear everything off the machine and reinstall windows, a clean formatted disk. Being a web developer without a pc is like being Gordan Brown without his charisma bypass - the two are required to exist.
Sure enough, 5am loomed, time for bed. The next day was filled with reinstalling required programs, carefully checking each one before installation. Job done. A weekend used up, but at least I was saved from the dastardley virus nasties on my machine.
Or was I....?
You chumps. You owe me one weekend's worth of work, 10 hours sleep and the will to live, which I also lost along the way.
Let me know where to send my invoice. It will be in the envelope clearly marked "This is NOT a virus"
I always thought iTunes behaved like malware - which is why is was removed and replaced with MediaMonkey sometime around the point the "Software Update Service" went and installed that crappy browser of theirs.
I'm surprised some of the move sophisticated "Behavioural" detection algorithms don't flag it up as malware from time to time.
Only chumps reformat thier PC at the first hint of a virus. If AVG was beloved, then it took care of the problem, move on. Sometimes it's better to have a second opinion from housecall.trendmicro.com or kaspersky.com's free online scan, or the free version of avast! Also that's why there is a virus valut in AVG, isolate it there, then the next day you can read news about how it's ok to restore those files.
It would save an awful lot of trouble and effort if, whenever there is some minor disaster involving antivirus, operating system, or other program or event, the "El Reg" system would automatically generate something like the following as the first Comment post:
"This product <fill in name> is clearly the most awful in <the UK>|<the world>|<the known universe> ever since <last week>|<last month>|<last year>|<the Big Bang>."
This would save the torrents of invective, accurate or otherwise, that some people delight in posting every time, without fail.
"I'm surprised some of the move sophisticated "Behavioural" detection algorithms don't flag it up as malware from time to time."
I think you are over-estimating the sophistication of the algorithms here. They aren't like an intelligent human watching over the computer's activities and thinking, "Hang on a mo, what's that program poking around there for?". That would require AI programming on a level of amanfrommars.
surely AVG8 should detect and delete itself then as well.
Last good AVG was 7.5 I installed 8 2 weeks ago and find its a piece of crap. For some reason it felt the need to consume 200 megs of ram and 10% of my processors utilization while I selected in its options to have all everything completely disabled. I don't know about anyone else but personally I do not need actively running shields, programs that monitor web use, and have other pointless programs loaded and always running I just want a program I can run a simple scan every now and then for piece of mind. Which AVG 8 is not.
I actually find it sad and ironic that the viruses, and trojans utilize less CPU time and ram than the thing that is supposed to clean them and make your system run better.
As far as I am concerned, if you need to install an application to transfer FLACS, OGGs, MP3s, etc to a MP3 player then that player is crap.
Oops, I forgot, the crApple Ipood can't play FLACs or OGGs natively. Instead it passes them through a shitty "transcoder", ruining them in the process. Why is that? Too bloated an OS code? Lazyness? The fact that crApple cannot force any sort of control on FLAC or OGG because they are open source and patent free?
Why is crApple so afraid of OGG and of FLAC? We saw the same recently when crApple refused to support OGG in the HTML 5 video codec support due to "uncertain patent landscape". What a load of bullshit.
They are as bad, if not worse than Macro$lut.
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I often wonder how much quicker Windows computers would run without anti-spyware, anti-virus and a variety of other security scanners. Perhaps almost a quick as Linux does on my machine right now. Smug? Maybe, running a superior OS which doesn't crash/loose my files/catch viruses. Definitely ;-)
AVG is a naggy, bloated POS anyway. For that reason, like someone else here has mentioned, I now recommend Avira for home Windows users (despite that annoying 'virus database has been updated' voiceover (you can switch that off though))
iTunes is a resource-hogging POS too. It's annoyingness, as far as I am concerned, stems from the fact you *need* it to transfer to iPods (which aren't IIRC recognised as mass storage devices) ; the nokia/SE PC Suite software are a resource hog too, but at least you can use those devices as MSDs.
I don't think it's as bad as AVG though. I still haven't forgiven AVG for the time when I happened to install it on a machine someone brought in from home to work (so it was connected to the work network so I could access the net) and it insisted I pay £££ because I was installing to a 'workstation'; and it wouldn't let me deinstall to try again without some registry hacking(in all fairness it doesn't do this any more though). And AVG 8 is such a resource hog/nagging POS it's disgraceful.
AVG have already lost my business due to their aggressive pop-ups, so I really couldn't care less at this point.
Note to the dimwits at AVG: If I wanted a focus stealing pop-up several times a day I'd have installed some malware, not an anti-virus program.
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