Vista, Antivirus: What If Allchin's Right?

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November 13, 2006, 3:34 PM

PERSPECTIVE Let’s start by clearing up the most frequent mis-perception that emerged from our story last Thursday regarding Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin’s comments. As you'll recall last Wednesday, Allchin held a telephone conference to announce Windows Vista’s release to manufacturing.

At that time, he never advised Vista users not to use antivirus software. What he did say was that he was so confident in Vista’s new "Defense-in-Depth" architecture and failsafes that, under limited circumstances, he would allow a family member to run the operating system without active anti-virus software. Thus, he implied that the operating system might not need antivirus software – at the very least, not in similar limited circumstances.

"Wow, you describe a specific situation and suddenly people extrapolate something completely different!" wrote Allchin on the Vista team blog on Friday.

I agree. The "something completely different" was the notion that the president of Microsoft would advise Vista users to turn off their antivirus or otherwise let their guard down. In the dissemination of this story, that’s the impression that some received; and when they reasoned (rightly) that this couldn’t be correct, we were taken to task by some of our readers and a few of our colleagues.

As a result, sources other than BetaNews reported that BetaNews had reported that Allchin had advised Vista users to turn antivirus off. He did not say that, nor did we say he did. However, we did write him over the weekend to make amends over the confusion that did result.


Sorry the original story is here : http://www.betanews.com/article/Allc...rus/1163104965


:source: Source: http://www.betanews.com/article/Vist...ght/1163448148

Antivirus software is a joke for the most part. If the user has a good firewall and knows what to click and what not to click. No problem.

Vista? Cool, the user access security is annoying, but I'm sure it really doesn't need AV software for protecting the OS files.

Well if you download a lot like most of us thats not very good advice , or share a computer your asking for trouble .

I just thought the story was funny ,another out going Microslob employee shooting his mouth off and having to eat crow.


The fact Beta News is scrambling to cover their ass is a hoot too .

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Antivirus software is a joke for the most part. If the user has a good firewall and knows what to click and what not to click. No problem.

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Totally disagree with this idea :P I played with virus a lot when i was young, for about 3 or 4 years, and all i can say is "nothing is perfect". Even when you dont click anything, you're still in danger because there're thousands of unnoticed virii in the wild. They dont deal with traditional action viriiz usually take, let's say append to the last section of PE or else etc,. instead, they use heavyuse of polymorphism and even heavy metamorphic (let's say Z0mbie/29A virii) and mostly never get caught and infecting around. When you download warez from internet, cracks, untrusted sources (torrent, newsgroup), you still can be infected by these type of virus. They're still there, you dont see them just because you dont know them and AV dont see them too. I saw too many people blindly believe that "dont click to the weird thing and you wont be infected". That is absolutely wrong. I agree that AV somehow "lie" the user that they will be 100% safe from virus. However, AV help detect some of (just some) these types of virus, by heuristic scanning and emulator. AV reduce your percentage of being infected by viruses. That's true. Normal users NEED to have good AV installed on their box.

BTW, don't ever trust in something like "uninfectable" or "beat the hacker". History of computer proves all these cocky advertisement wrong. 2000, XP, 2003 are example of "uninfectable platform" was infected with thousands kind of malware.

what if google sent you a virus?

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Originally Posted by Hairbautt

Antivirus software is a joke for the most part. If the user has a good firewall and knows what to click and what not to click. No problem.

Vista? Cool, the user access security is annoying, but I'm sure it really doesn't need AV software for protecting the OS files.

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agreed. especially with todays browsers, it's practically impossible to get a virus for experienced people

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Originally Posted by Yoga

what if google sent you a virus?

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How, through email? Don't click the download button? :huh:

Or if they unintentionally had one released in their software Google packs, I'd sue, right?

to be honest i never really used any thing for XP aswell and my computer doesnt have had any problems .. Just use a firewall and dont just click on the yes button check what it says