Web Shield Power Mode

[MrRAlan]

Where in the .ini file can this be enabled?

[Eddy]

Already checked THIS THREAD?

[RejZoR]

Do it with my avast! External Control.

[Vlk]

Just a small clarification, there's nothing like "WebShield power mode".
I'm sorry to say but we all (at Alwil) find the name that RejZoR chose for this (rather useless) "feature"  in his AEC tool quite unfortunate...
Especially if it doesn't exactly say what it does and what are the DANGERS of turning it on.

[RejZoR]

But the readme file in AEC does explain
Well,in my opinion,there is a bigger danger when not using it then when you use it.
Browsers are not the only programs that use HTTP transfers...
The name is ofcourse mine,but this is because i had to use something short for quick explanation.

[Vlk]

That's easy to say if you don't have to solve those HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of emails and phonecalls that were coming to your tech support department when it was turned on by default (in the original 4.6 release). Complaining that this and that stopped working after updating to the latest avast version...

I'm not saying the feature is useless, but it's certainly quite prone to all sorts of compatibility problems (mainly caused by the unpleasant fact that port 80 is now heavily overused).

[igor]

Just out of curiosity - can anybody explain me what this "power mode" actually does?

[Vlk]

It turns off the OptIn mode. That is, it effectively enables WebShield scanning from all processes, not just a selected (and well tested) set of browsers.

The problem is that it turns out that a number of applications use port 80 for other purposes which means that really bad things start happening...

[RejZoR]

By default avast! NOW checks only specified processes for HTTP traffic (like browsers).
Power Mode enables scanning of HTTP traffic on all processes except those internally excluded by you guys.

EDIT:
Well i'm using all sorts of programs,browsers and firewalls and i never encountered a single problem with Power Mode.

[lukor]

By default avast! NOW checks only specified processes for HTTP traffic (like browsers).
Power Mode enables scanning of HTTP traffic on all processes except those internally excluded by you guys.

EDIT:
Well i'm using all sorts of programs,browsers and firewalls and i never encountered a single problem with Power Mode.

An example might be streaming radio via WinAmp, where under some circumstances (where WebShield is not able to recognize the content type from MIME headers) it will cache all the contents to temporary file and as a side effect will also occasionally cause distrurbances in the audio stream. Together you will get choppy radio and eventually loose all your disk space ;-)

But chances are that you'll use only well behaved audio stream servers and will never ever notice this kind of an error.

[RejZoR]

Yeah,i'm using SHOUTCast servers in WinAMP. Never had any problems.
Also all WMP10 streaming videos worked without any problems (which are placed on different pages with difefrent crap around them). never a single problem.
Thats why i use this feature and implimented it in AEC for users that want more security (and they never encountered any problems like me)