padgett%tccslr.dnet@uvs1.orl.mmc.com (Padgett Peterson) (08/14/90)
Jim Powlesland writes concerning the price of the McAfee utilities: >>It's my impression that this resentment is >>very real and much of it comes from the fact that users can get >>relatively the samelevel of protection on their Macintoshes (ie. >>Disinfectant and GateKeeper) FREE OF CHARGE. The last time I looked, there were eight MAC viruses with several substrains. To use Patricia Hoffman's classification, three are common (nVir, Scores, & WDEF), three are rare, and two are extinct. In contrast the un-zipped VSUM9008 is over 300k long, lists 138 distinct viruses, 19 of which are considered "common": 4096, Ashar, Brain, Cascade, Cascade-B, Dark Avenger, Den Zuk Disk Killer, Jerusalem, Jerusalem B, Joshi, Korea, Microbes, Murphy, Ohio, Ping Pong-B, Stoned, Sunday, & Yankee Doodle. For that matter, given the widespread "shareware" distribution of SCAN, CLEAN, & even NETSCAN, I suspect that there are far more unpaid copies of these utilities than any of the MAC products. Therefore, I suspect that we have two levels of uses: the individual who is free to choose whether or not to pay a nominal fee for the product, and the corporate/educational user who must choose how to budget his/her funds. Again, no one is being forced to use any product. People are free to choose what level of protection/detection they want and to take the time and trouble to create their own protection if they so desire. To castigate someone for having the effrontery to charge for providing a service, particularly someone who allows the market to choose whether or not to pay and who is consumed with an incredible number of updates, smacks of the worst aspects of socialism (personal opinion). On the CRC subject. My feeling is that the signatures should be maintained as a separate file rather than tacked onto the program, however the user is free to choose whether or not to use it. To say that Mr. McAfee might be liable for copyright infringement would imply that IBM is also for providing DEBUG. SCAN provides a tool, it is the users responsibility to determine what to do with it (caveat: I am not a lawyer nor do I have any desire to be). In any event, the /AV switch is no more dangerous than the /D. It does indicate that Mr. McAfee is concerned about the limitations of SCAN and is trying to find a better solution. He is on the right track, and if he must use a publicly-known algorithm for the CRC, the dual method used by VALIDATE is better than most (I prefer a simple machine-unique one for internal validation and a different and more rigorous one for public transmittal). Enough, Padgett