To those who are not understanding what 'this' post is about -- it is about Avast (7) polling the server while updates are off. This post is not about 'our' reasons for doing so, which has nothing to do with protection
This is the file reputation (cloud scanning) system. It's a key part of the innovations introduced in avast v7 (and, seriously, it is saving tens of thousands of our users from malware every day).
If you're uncomfortable with it though, you're of course free to disable it. Summary -> Cloud Services -> Settings -> uncheck "Enable reputation services" (I'm not sure but the changes may not become effective until after the next reboot).
Thanks
Vlk
@VLK: We are continuing our research and have found that disabling 'reputation services' has slowed the polling down, while the polling continues at less intervals. Rather than us blindly disabling things, via trial and error, can you offer any other suggestion(s)/recommendations as to what to disable to stop the traffic while 'update' and 'reputation' are disabled? --Currently with the aforementioned items disabled-- the polling has to do with "emupdate".
The polling is attemping to 'GET' (download) the 'emupdate' without prompting or notifying the user(s). We cannot find anything in the help file for 'emergency update' (emupdate) or what might be enabling/controlling this. Given that none of our boxes which run Avast has 'emupdate' on the HDD's, we need to know 'what' from our Avast installs is polling the server with these 'GET' request for 'emupdate' without obvious documentation and notification to the machines users, that this is taking place --in addition to our original concern of the program polling with 'updates' and 'reputation' disabled.
There are times when we require our network to be entirely silent. We also like to be notified, or at least have documentation as to why a program is reaching out over our network; and a way to disable it should we need to do so.
Once again, this post is not about Avasts' ability to protect, it is about the network traffic generated by Avast (7).