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>
>Man....Are you having a bad day Randy? I think it was rather
>unfair of you to " bash " Shelly...he was after all just
>posting a " News Article". Don't shoot the messenger please!!
I apologize to y'all if that was the appearance, it isn't my heart's intent to criticize Shelly or anyone else in a personal way; but I still insist that a public forum should strive to be professional, fair, and unbiased in its proffered opinions; should strive to stick to provable facts; and should refrain from pejorative and belitting, emotionally loaded terms like "McCrappy" -- and from that sort of negative labeling which communicates venom and animus toward a particular Vendor or Product. That sort of rhetoric does come across as a form of intolerance, bigotry, and for lack of better terms I have come to view this sort of rhetoric and intolerance in public forums as similar to "Vendor-Hate" or a type of "Vendor-Racism". Maybe we need to invent a "Vendor-Hate-Crime-Law", as there is ample evidence of such product-hatred to convict some of you {no offense intended}.  
>
>If people have a bad experience with a particular
>product..they are unlikely to recommend it in the
>future...that is just human nature.And it is also their
>perogative to NOT recommend a product based on those poor past
>experiences. Those opinions are just as relevent as any one
>elses.To start calling people and a Forum in general
>"disgusting" because of these experiences is simply not on.
I apologize for misunderstanding; I don't find people disgusting; what I find undesirable {and in my haste used the D-Word} is, repeated and relentless prejudicial attack unfairly directed against one Vendor, and without supporting facts to back it up. I mean, "bashing" through sarcasm and namecalling such as repeatedly referring to one Vendor as "McCrappy", for example. Whether y'all like it or not, NAI/McAfee has been and **is still** a major security vendor, a major player, and an outstanding AV in terms of its detection rate. I will get to that part in the below comments.
>
>McAffee did have a lot of problems in the past. That is a
>fact. I am not going to recommend their product to any of my
>clients or friends.... because I have seen TOO many problems
>with McAffee ( and Network Associates products ) in the past.
>I've lost faith in their product and it will take a lot to
>persuade me to ever trust them again.
Fair enough but it should be observed that you're basing your *present* opinion on {years} *past* experience. Indeed I get impression that many folks on this Board don't have a clue about the most current McAfee product and technology, they are just spouting a "party line" of animus directed toward the McAfee of years past.
>
>BTW, most of these problems were not in the actual Virus
>detection itself..but in the basic operation of the program.
>That being said, I have had McAffee ( and NAV ) miss Virus's
>and Trojans that Pc-Cillan picked up. In Norton's case it was
>a relatively minor " Joke virus" that Symantec decided was not
>"worthy" of being classified as a true Virus. McAfee has
>missed some doozies though ( Yes..all definitions up to date
>). On that basis...I guess you have to add me to the "
>McCrappy' side.
You cannot base opinion on a single flimsy sample, especially a sample that different Vendors disagree on whether it is even worthy of detection. Norton does include Jokes in Expanded Threats but they used to reject all Jokes: For more information on Expanded Threats, go to the Expanded Threats documentation at the Site. See also, Do Symantec antivirus products detect Jokes, Adware, or Spyware?
Does anyone realize how many hundreds of thousands of malware samples there are floating around out there? I have about a Gigabyte in my personal collection but still haven't even scratched the surface! And do y'all realize that a kiddie or hacker can take *any* of those samples and modify it {through various techniques of packing, encryption, hex-editing, rebasing, etc.} so as to elude detection in a given AV Scanner? if you base conclusion about a product on a single sample or two, you are being unprofessional, naive, and foolish -- given the huge base of malware that exists. Sound conclusions can only be drawn on representative malware testbeds, which is why we have professional testing agencies to help us base reasoned and intelligent opinion upon; rather than jumping to a wrong conclusion based on a single sample that, for all you know, may not even be considered malware by all vendors, or may not stand the scrutiny of a real-live Virus Analyst who knows what he is doing.
No offense but I've seen too many folks foolishly jump to conclusions and say "Product-X Sucks because it missed this-or-that", without any proof offered -- and often these same people will not send me the sample they claim is undetected, even when I ask them; will often offer excuses: "they have no time", "they deleted it", etc. In other words, I'm supposed to take their word for it even if they refuse to cooperate or to provide even a modicum of evidence or proof to support their claims .. we need to be professional, we need to be careful, in this game of AV evaluation .. IMHO.
>
>As for the claim that McAfee's current detection rate is
>superior to Pc-Cillan's,( or to any other AV program ) well,
>that seems to be debatable.
The facts are this:
1. McAfee has far superior unpackers to Trend, probably only Kaspersky has better unpackers than McAfee. In fact, unless they put some rudimentary unpackers in the latest release of Trend PC-Cillin, I don't think, last time I checked, Trend had *any* unpackers or ability to detect runtime-packed malware.
2. McAfee and Kaspersky consistently score near the top at Rokop, at Univ of Hamburg, with VirusP, and most of the other tests I've seen published on the Net; whereas Trend scores more near the middle of the pack. To be fair, McAfee and Trend do have similar Virus Bulletin {VB} testing records. But the VB is the only test I've seen where Trend matches McAfee in detection test results.
3. McAfee has superior trojan detection. So far as peripheral things like Jokes, Dialers, Exploits, etc. -- the most current release of McAfee VirusScan has an Option to turn on or off the detection of these threats. Most of the AVs in their latest releases are including extended or expanded threat detection. Kaspersky has included them in its extended bases for years. And I also am pretty sure that McAfee's Engine is robust enough that even older versions of McAfee can detect these expanded threats.
4. McAfee has some of the best generic signatures. By that I mean, for example if they detect one variant of say, the Spybot Worm, they often can detect many other packed, modified, etc. variants of the same virus because they make strong generic signatures which can thwart a hacker's attempt to modify viruses to avoid detection. And with stong generic signatures they can pre-emptively detect many new variants without having to add special signatures the way other AVs without strong generics do. You only have to go to Norman's or ESET's website, and look at the hundreds of Spybot Worm variants they add, to see what I'm talking about -- and they still may not cover or detect as many as a Vendor like McAfee is detecting due to its strong generics.
>
>Detection rates seems to vary from
>report to report, but one thing that seems to be pretty
>consistant is that Trend's products always seem to be rated in
>the Top three ( I'm being conservative...lately they've been
>getting a lot of rave reviews ) for the "overall" product.
if you're speaking of the CNET-ZDNet awards, be aware that many people don't put much stock in those. In the past, my Norton AV has won similar awards but I never put much confidence in popular "PC Magazine" type of reviews because they lack the professionalism of other official comparative tests and {no offense but} they have been held to suspicion that they can be "bought" or influenced by advertising dollars. Again, I don't target Trend in those comments, I include Symantec as well, these types of reviews are suspect because they are often reviewing products of Vendors that have contributed heavily to their advertising revenues. {I'm not insinuating that the reviews *are* corrupted, only that they give *appearance* of conflict of interest in this way}.
If you go to respected Security Forums and Communities you will find that McAfee and Kaspersky repeatedly outperform the others in detection rate based on broad and fair, statistically representative malware sample testbeds; esepecially when trojans, "zoo" samples, runtime-packed samples, and other malware are included which a more narrow testbed might not include.
>
>Personally, I've never had ANY system, that I've installed
>Pc-Cillan on, have ANYTHING sneak past it, nor have I ever had
>any complaints about operational problems of the program
>itself. The program is fast, easy to use... and it just plain
>works. I can't ask for more. I'm not going to get into a
>*issing match about which AV program is Top Dog right now.
>Frankly I don't care. I have one that has worked reliably for
>years...and that's all that matters to me.
Since you prefaced your remarks with the leading, "Personally .." -- that is fine, you are entitled to personal preference and opinion, even when it differs from mine. I do not "personally" consider Trend Micro amongst the top three Vendors myself -- I would say the top three are Kaspersky, McAfee and the third spot is up for grabs but might be occupied by a product with a KAV-based Engine. Products with the Kasperky engine consistently outperform the rest of the pack; and that is an undisputable fact, one need only inquire or lurk at respected Security Forums & Boards around the Net to see the superiority of KAV engine and signatures.
But I realize that personal product preferences go beyond just the hard facts of official detection rate test results. There are many intangibles. So of course there is nothing wrong with you or others having various reasons why you prefer a particular product or Vendor, in this case Trend Micro PCC. We can "agree to disagree" on that score.
All that said, let me add and emphasize that, all the major AVs pretty much provide 100% detection of in-the-wild viruses. They cooperate amongst each other when a new major threat is loosed into the wild, which is a good thing. And they all pretty much respond to serious new ITW threats within hours. If they didn't they would not be doing their jobs and would certainly not be competitive. So one cannot go wrong with any of the major Vendors, McAfee or Trend included, IMHO -- so far as the very basic AntiVirus protection is concerned.
>
>Randy: I think you've gotten yourself too worked up over this
>rather "insignificant" item. Life is far too short to worry
>about such Trivial things. Enjoy the Holiday Season and don't
>sweat the "small stuff". It ain't worth it.
>
>Merry Christmas 
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you too!
I just hope that my public stance here will help to cause some folks to rethink and reconsider the kind of casual pejorative rhetoric they have been using, and to try to be more professional and fair in their comments on products of various vendors, NAI products included. Thanks. 
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I'm not all in favor of how he vented his views but what the hell, we all make poor judgements from time to time don't we?? Let it go.
