Sticks and Stones
In the last 18 months we have seen a drastic increase in the number of virus and virus-like threats that have become so widespread that they have come to the attention of the mainstream news. Regardless of whether trojans are called virii or virii are the product of hackers, it is a truth that new computer users are more aware of the posibility of a virus attack.
Awareness leads to caution, caution leads to stress, stress leads to scapegoats..
In this case, the chosen scapegoat is Norton Antivirus.
A worthwhile, effective, user-friendly program that auotmatically updates itself, quarantine’s suspect files, can be made to ask for permission before acting on an infection, scans incoming email, downloads, removable media, the installer pre-scans before installing and the installation disk is bootable in case you have let your infection run that far.
Yet the program receives an awful lot of criticism from people, everything from “breaking the computer” to having a lousy activation system to failing to identify a week old virus when the program hasn’t been updated in 4 years.
These are examples, not exagerations. The first one I have seen no evidence of ever. Did it corrupt your MBR? Did it delete important system files? Did it mangle the windows registry? Or is it a result of the second, the Activition system?
Many software firms are moving towards a subscription based system for the licensing of their products, those that haven’t done so already. It makes a huge amount of sense to have some record of who uses your product when said product is so well-designed and downright essential that it is a top pick for software pirates. Norton Antivirus’ activation system is so easy I have seen children using it. Lets go through it..
1) Open the program.
2) Notice the big text saying “Attention!” at the top of the screen next to the bright yellow Exclamation Point!
3) Now go down the list and see if you can find what might cause that (!) at the top. Could it be “Auto Protect”? No, that has a lovely green tick. Same with Email Scanning and Script blocking? Can’t be those then. Of course, being the conscientious person you have already run a full system scan, so that is green as well.
4) Keep looking! Seeing as you’ve already made sure your program is running the latest updates ( What’s that, it updates automatically during the install ) both the “Virus Definitions” and “Automatic Liveupdate” are green.. and what does that leave us? Well lookey! It seems that perhaps we have a certain number of days to “activate” this product.
5)Click on the “Activate” section. What’s this?
6) An activate button? And this lets us communicate directly with the symantec server? And in 15 seconds we’ll be activated?..
It’s a simple process, it really is. Anyone that can’t activate a copy of Norton Antivirus 2004 should not be in charge of the security of their PC, simple as that.