Avast free

Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 16:54:52 -0700, Drew wrote:

On 3/30/2014 4:37 PM, Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 17:20:33 -0500, Char Jackson wrote:

On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 11:52:59 -0700, Drew wrote:

Maybe the word "constant" was used wrongly.. What I meant was after I
chose not to update the program anymore I was badgered repeatedly to do
so (as in every time I brought it out of sleep mode) I have taken the
advice of others to make some changes to the settings but was still
wondering about other antivirus program advice.
Why not just allow it to update?
IMO,that would be sensible, but Drew doesn't seem to agree.

How about.... Because in the past many programs have taught me that
newer is not always better. With Avast I have found that they seem to be
dumbing down the program and adding some really useless "tools"?
Unfortunately because of time constraints lately I have not looked into
turning some of this stuff off. Many have pointed out my stupidity and I
appreciate the help in curing the problem. I would still like to know
what others are running and what there opinions are though.

OK, that makes sense to me, although I still respectfully disagree. To
be a bit more fair, I'll tell you my thinking.

My thinking is specific to antimalware. Malware keeps changing, since
there are a lot of people out there having fun at your expense and mine.

So antimalware programs need to keep changing as well. In particular, as
the approaches taken by the malware programmers change, some new
exploits can't be handled by simply changing the malware definitions,
and require new algorithms in the code to cover the new behavior.

So updating antimalware programs is very prudent, in my book.


In particular, heuristic detection.

Half of AV work, is signature based (and then all we need is fresh
definition files, not new code).

But the other half, is behavioral (heuristic), watching software
attempting to access things it should not be accessing. Like making
changes to the system random number generator, which is used for cryptography.
Kaspersky used to check for that, and the warning dialog boxes all the
time, drove me nuts. It's the reason I didn't renew the subscription.

Paul