If you run your own website, you might have been following the brouhaha over the new LinkScanner feature of GriSoft’s AVG virus scanner.
I can’t find this text on the GriSoft website, but it was quoted in a comment on another blog I was reading today:
Following is AVG’s official response to LinkScanner concerns: We’d like to thank our web community for bringing these challenges to our attention, as building community trust and protecting all of our users is critical to us. We have modified the Search-Shield component of LinkScanner to only notify users of malicious sites; this modified version will be rolled out on July 9th 2008. As of this date. Search-Shield will no longer scan each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that webmasters addressed with us. However, it is important to note that AVG still offers full protection against potential exploits through the Active Surf-Shield component of our product, which checks every page for malicious content as it is visited but before it is opened.
Hopefully that’s really from GriSoft, and it’s the last thing we’ll hear about the problem.
Yes, the posting was really from AVG:-)
Pat Bitton Director, Global Communications AVG Technologies
I’d better watch what I say, celebrities read this blog. 😉
Hurray! Thanks for the confirmation.
Yes, Ploni, if you post here, my fame will rub off on you. Whether that’s a good thing or not is up to you. 😉
Ah-hah! Trying to trick me into participating more! That won’t work, I’ll just participate more to spite you!
AVG Australia have also posted a response on their website about this. Seems to confirm what Pat is saying. AVG Responds to and Resolves LinkScanner Issues
Yup, it was confirmed on The Register early yesterday morning.
Although AVG is a nice antivirus scanner, I found that 8.0 was a lot more bloated. (Bloat is important in av programs because they can be resource hogs). I prefer now either Avast! or Antivir. I’m running Avast! on my Windows “Boot Camp” partition now. (Which can double as a VMWare Fusion image. Nice feature!) Avast! also doesn’t have pop-up updating like AVG, though it requires you register it via email with the company every 14 months.
By resource-hogging, I assume you mean CPU-hogging — size-bloat and speed-bloat are two different measurements. AVG stacked up very well against the more-popular virus scanners speed-wise, in tests done a couple years ago (on the previous version). They haven’t been re-run on the new version yet, so far as I know, but I suspect it would still be pretty good.
CPU and RAM hogging, yes. 8.x is a lot less lightweight. Someone at AVG really dropped the ball on it in more ways than one. It’s got more features, some of them ill-thought out, and is bloated. IOW, second-system effect. It’s still better than what Symantec, Norton, and McAffee put out though. That doesn’t say much. Avast! or Antivir appear to be the way to go. Plus they have antimalware, though one can use separate utilities for that.
On a mostly-unrelated note, I removed AVG from my development Windows XP virtual machine last night. Not because of any problems with it, but because I set the VM’s networking to host-only, drastically cutting the number of attack vectors. The only way malware could get on the VM now is if I put it there, and I almost never install software on that machine.
AVG is still on my dual-boot Windows partition though.