We use McAfee at work. We discovered last week when our network connection got upgraded that it's responsible for a 30% drop in network throughput. If only we could persuade our IT department to do something about it :-/
John McAfee releases NSFW video on how to uninstall security code
International fugitive, criminal suspect and self-described eccentric millionaire John McAfee has released a tongue-in-cheek video explaining how to uninstall the security software that still bears his name. McAfee claims that one of the most frequent questions he's asked is how to get rid of the pernicious software, despite …
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Thursday 20th June 2013 07:05 GMT Magister
Forced on us as well.
<rant>
Many people here leave their PCs turned on over night. Starting up in the morning takes anything from 10 - 15 minutes (I've actually timed it) of which a considerable proportion is waiting for the crapware to scan systems. A few systems take even longer.
Added to out of date McAfee, Intrusion Detection software (5 years out of date), Winzip(!), a couple of application launchers, printing managment software and a couple of logon scripts to create mapped drives that don't work because the DNS servers are not dynamically managed (all entries are manually created; forward lookup zones only, no reverse lookups) and the addresses are wrong.
Worse, we have people "managing" systems (in the loosest possible sense of the word) that actually cannot even use a basic PC. It really is quite tragic as the company is wasting so much money without getting anything in return.
</rant>
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Thursday 20th June 2013 12:14 GMT Magister
No.
It's a global company and the "support" is provided by one of the biggest vendors at an eye watering cost.
I am aware that this is not an entirely unusual situation; it seems the bigger the company, the worse the IT provision. I can't speak for others, but the amount of money that is thrown away here on poor IT services / implementation is awful; they waste about 10 times my entire IT budget (including wages) that I controlled at my last place.
I just get so frustrated because I know that I could resolve a lot of the issues; I've proven it several times at other businesses. But as far as they are concerned, I don't work in IT so it's nothing to do with me.
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Thursday 20th June 2013 09:38 GMT AndrueC
Starting up in the morning takes anything from 10 - 15 minutes
Yeah - we also have a regular scan(*). Luckily it runs to US time so for me in the UK it's after the end of the working day. I've set myself a reminder in Outlook that I should leave my PC on overnight those days. Otherwise it hits my i5-2400 bad enough to make typing jerky. Until recently I was using a single core Pentium at home and that was virtually unusable while the scan was running. Nearly an hour of barely able to keep up with my typing.
(*)Exact time/frequency withheld for security reasons(**)
(**)Probably not but it's a dangerous world out there :)
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Thursday 20th June 2013 14:05 GMT AndrueC
A N Other global company here as well.
To be fair it all works most of the time but I do find something unsavoury in the fact that our brand new 10Mb/s leased line (which is indeed 10Mb/s at the demarcation point) ends up being 5.7Mb/s by the time it's passed through McAfee, along our VPN and into the bowels of the server room over in the US. But it seems like I have a choice. Raise tickets and complain and end up feeling frustrated or just give up and let it all wash over me.
I'm the wrong side of 40 to be getting worked up over how the company is run :)
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Wednesday 19th June 2013 20:05 GMT Graham Cluley
Re: Pot meet kettle
I never sawed a person in half on stage at Infosec.
I did once guillotine Janet "Blue Peter" Ellis's hand off. But that was at Networks 96. And I was working for Dr Solomon's at the time.
Sophos tended to be a fair bit more corporate in its trade show presentations than Dr Solomon's, but anything that breaks the monotony of presentations about virtualization, high wire gymnastics on the Symantec booth, and dollybirds handing out USB sticks has to be a good thing I reckon.
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Friday 21st June 2013 13:25 GMT AndrueC
Re: Pot meet kettle
Sophos tended to be a fair bit more corporate in its trade show presentations than Dr Solomon's,
I've still got a couple of their cowboy T-shirts. When AuthenTec was moving out we accidentally took a couple of boxes with us. They were all XXL though more use as tent covers, really. Especially for me :)
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Wednesday 19th June 2013 19:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
send lawyers, guns and money....
McAfee is truly horrendous - used to choke up machines with 99% CPU usage.
Norton is not much better - suddenly when AV was given away free, the "big" companies went BLOATWARE.
They annoy you a billion times a day with pop ups that 99% of "normal users" have no f*cking clue what the question / information means, let alone what to click on to "answer" it. It also behaves like a nanny looking after a three year old.
The amount of machines I find infected by stuff that FREE software can find and remove that these AV suites miss is unreal.
Down with this sort of thing.
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Thursday 20th June 2013 08:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Gave up after 1min 18secs
But obviously this isn't the original pronunciation, as "Mac" isn't stressed in Scottish names. The original Gaelic Mac a' Phi would have had the stress on the "fee" part.
(But most people in Scotland pronounce the software wrong again, stressing the "aff", because they don't speak Gaelic, and MacAfee isn't common in Scotland -- instead it's normal MacPhie, with a stressed "fee".)
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Wednesday 19th June 2013 20:25 GMT LaeMing
We have McAfee on the managed desktops at work. RETCH!
Because we have a site license, I could put it on the unmanaged laptops we use in the gallery, but the AV built into Win7 seems to work fine and won't constantly pop update reminder dialogs over the top of a displaying work - an orange icon in the (usually hidden) system bar (whatever Windows calls it) is a nice and not-obnoxious way to indicate the system needs an update next time I have it plugged into a network.
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Thursday 20th June 2013 07:12 GMT TeeCee
Re: We have McAfee on the managed desktops at work. RETCH!
...the AV built into Win7...
Er......WTF?
Do you mean that you're using MS Security Essentials? It's a good product, but even that's not built in and has to be installed seperately.
The only thing that 7 comes with as standard is a popup box screaming blue murder at you to install something pronto!
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Friday 21st June 2013 09:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Just saying
I've managed AV software for many years stretching back to Dr Solomons. Most complaints about slow systems can be resolved with configuration - not just limited to Mcafee software but any AV vendor.
Most of the current crop of AV use a form of intelligent caching saving scan time.
Scheduled scanning can be cancelled/deferred in consumer and corporate if the admin allows it - if the admin does not allow deferment this is hardly the vendors fault.
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Friday 21st June 2013 10:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Daily Scan
What a stupid idea.
Q: How does an IT department think it is necessary to scan every file on a workstation on a regular basis, when all opened files are subject to a real-time scan anyway?
Things to consider: in a network you usually keep important data on servers. In order to download or copy a file it has to be opened and therefore subject to a real-time scan.
A: They didn't think, it didn't even occur to them to look at the default settings or consider how the configuration might be tailored to their requirements.
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Friday 21st June 2013 11:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
"15 year ago" - plurals?
Usually when there is more than one of something we change the word to show as such - often by adding a letter 's'.
Why are so many people incapable of understanding this?
An example:
"I took out a two-year contract. That means that the contract will run for two years."
Note also the use of a hyphen in the first sentence (sorry if that's a bit too technical for you)..
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Friday 21st June 2013 20:13 GMT Doozer
I just had some oik at my local PC world try to sell me the benefits of McAfee. I asked him if he had five minutes to spare... I played him the video and then said "so do you think I want it then...?" and the daft arse said that he thought I would like it!
My thoughts about McAfee the man... He is actually quite cool :D
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
