> NOD32 by ESET is good... It has a free version...
> http://www.eset.com/download/free_trial_download.php > It is by far the most unobtrusive anti-virus program I have ever
> used... it takes up virtually no resources... it's beautiful...
Now to solve the problem I mentioned, you only have to convince the 50
million who havne't upgraded from AVG7 to AVG8 to us that instead.
Yeah. Installed with all its bells and whistles, AVG now scans all
links it finds on a web page (so it actually accesses all those urls)
in order to determine of there are any dangers. Particularly visible
when you do a search and see it placing check marks or exclamation
marks next to every search result.
You can disable the link scanner.
But AVG 8 certainly takes a heck of a Lot longer to scan my computer
fully than its predecessor did. It's now taking over 9 hours to do a
full scan of my pc that runs XP and has only an 80GB HD, while before
it was about 4 hours which I considered excruciatingly long anyway. No
pleased at all, though maybe I can say now it's more effective at
catching viruses on the fly, as you visit a website that attempts to
download something nasty. Caught 2 of them yesterday only.
Also the full scan checks for cookies as well, which is silly IMO.
I've removed that too and will see later today if it improves the scan
time. Otherwise I'll have to reconsider using AVG. Too bad.
Well... This would be a direct violation of the google webmaster
guidelines... right?
Don't send automated queries to Google...
I wonder if people could get their websites banned if they were
surfing the web from a machine hosting their website? Doubtful... but
it would be interesting if it happened...
I use AVG... but have it 'Manual only' ... (I hate most Auto-*).
I also use Avast (free, and no, I'm no in/from Yorksire ;)) .. and
that has some nice on-access protection (for inbound only... WHY would
you wantto check ALL links on apink? duh).
hmmm.
I don't know about it being against the Google Guidelines... but I bet
that is screwing up various visitor tracking/clickthrough/hitcounts :D
Wonder if it also screws around with Google counting clicks in the
SERPs?
> > Also the full scan checks for cookies as well, which is silly IMO.
> > I've removed that too ...
> How? I can't see how to do that.
When you open the AVG control center, click Tools > Advanced settings
and check through all the options under Links Scanner and then Scans >
expand it and go through each one and disable what you think you don't
need.
Once you remove the Link Scanner option, the AVG icon in the taskbar
will display an exclamation mark - you'll have to live with it.
> I use AVG... but have it 'Manual only' ... (I hate most Auto-*).
> I also use Avast (free, and no, I'm no in/from Yorksire ;)) .. and
> that has some nice on-access protection (for inbound only... WHY would
> you wantto check ALL links on apink? duh).
> hmmm.
> I don't know about it being against the Google Guidelines... but I bet
> that is screwing up various visitor tracking/clickthrough/hitcounts :D
> Wonder if it also screws around with Google counting clicks in the
> SERPs?
Actually third party traffic trackers cannot detect AVG links scanner
hits. You will only see traces of them in your server logs with this
fake user agent:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)
It's been said that it's just from the AVG toolbar, but I think even
without that toolbar, simply having Links Scanner activated woudl
result in this.
Not only would such a trick consume vast bandwidth directly - it would
also have the effect of polluting caches all over the network.
Real users click on only one or two items per SERPs page, and there's
commonality in what they click on too. Where every link is
automatically clicked on, VASTLY more data moves into caches around
the Internet. Polluted caches are less likely to have what you want,
so there's more bandwidth used to recover from that, too.
AVG are going to have to rethink this one, and quickly. I wonder if
they can change this behaviour with a standard update, or whether
users will have to reinstall.
> "AVG 8 scans search results on Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Live
> Search."
Well... Google does have javascript handlers around all of it's
links...
So... I guess it might only be scraping the href attributes out of the
search result page... and if that's the case... it really makes no
sense to me... I mean why wouldn't they just crawl the web themselves?
A software company with 50 million users should at the very least
jhave some sort of centralized database rather than client side
redundancies... wouldn't you think?
If they are only scraping Google, Yahnoo and MSN content... then
really... it just seems like a really infective solution all-
together... for it to work effectively at all they would have to
follow links on every page a user visits... search engines or not...
and they would have to follow javascript links too...
For a feature like that ( if it just surface scrapes a search results
html href's ) to define a companies product has got to be suicide...
I can hear them now... oh... well... we don't scan the sponsored links
because it would mess with the Search Engines advertising programs...
We only feel it necessary to screw with everybody else and Google,
Yahoo and MSN are the means by which we can...
> If the user agent name is predictable, it will take less than a week
> for most malware to spot it and look squeaky clean to it.
I would think if it's not pre-fetched and stored... then serving the
malware ech time the page is loaded a second time would completely
defeat them...
And if it is pre-fetched and they are only scraping search results...
then they could just bury the malware to any user not sending a search
referral string...
I don't really know what it is doing, so I can't make any detailed
comments :). For what it's worth however, there are plugins & settings
for Firefox (and other browsers) as well as the Google Web Accelerator
which do something similar: they prefetch pages linked in order to
increase the perceived speed.
I imagine one of the problems is that these tools don't mind being
recognized and tend to follow the rules. A malware scanner will want
to be unrecognizable by design, which in turn will make it close to
impossible to filter out in server based logs analysis. JavaScript
based analytics such as Google Analytics will most likely not be
impacted.
> I don't really know what it is doing, so I can't make any detailed
> comments :). For what it's worth however, there are plugins & settings
> for Firefox (and other browsers) as well as the Google Web Accelerator
> which do something similar: they prefetch pages linked in order to
> increase the perceived speed.
But they're a discretionary addition - their users will know they're
there and may disable them when they're not required.
The AVG problem is a potential 70,000,000 users who don't know it's
happening.
> > I don't really know what it is doing, so I can't make any detailed
> > comments :). For what it's worth however, there are plugins & settings
> > for Firefox (and other browsers) as well as the Google Web Accelerator
> > which do something similar: they prefetch pages linked in order to
> > increase the perceived speed.
> But they're a discretionary addition - their users will know they're
> there and may disable them when they're not required.
> The AVG problem is a potential 70,000,000 users who don't know it's
> happening.
Yes, and I've complained abotu it to everybody who'd listen and even
those who'd not listgen like AVG themselves.
You'd notice the slowing down of your surfing most likely so you'd
probably end up doing what I did and remove the "feature".
Mind you, my newer PC that runs Vista and is lots faster then my XP
machine isn't exhibiting this slow-down in any noticeable way, so
maybe many AVG users won't be motivated to do away with the link
scanner.
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