Nice article in SF Chronicle

[Pavel Baudis]

Nice article about fee versus free antivirus programs is
here  

Pavel

[RejZoR]

Hehe, indeed interesting Even Eduard Kucera is mentioned in it

[Starfighter]

Thanks!  Nice article indeed.

Makes me wonder though... the latest trend seems to be that quite a few ISPs are now offering their clients free (or low cost) av filtering done via their e-mail servers.   Won't that hurt the bottom line for many of the other av companies who mainly rely upon retail sales of their boxed av packages?  Hmm, guess the real money will be in server side av protection?!  (then again, email protection is only half the equation--considering that you can also get viruses from downloading infected files etc)

[RejZoR]

Not exactly. Only mails can be checked on server side. Everything else is done localy on users machine. My ISP for example checks all mails with Symantec Mail scanner. But i use GMail anyway so that doesn't make any difference to me

[Lisandro]

Not exactly. Only mails can be checked on server side.

Yeah...
So why the article says:

McAfee and Symantec say the protection offered through their ISP partners is the same as what you'd get if you bought their software outright. Getting protection through your ISP is convenient, especially for computer users who don't want to bother with shopping for and installing the software. Since antivirus programs need to be continually updated to be effective and most packages come with only a one-year subscription of updates, getting it this way also saves the buyer from having to renew the subscription or replace the software 12 months later.

Maybe this will give false security sensation.

Antivirus for free

As for the truly free products, some of them rank as well as or even better in tests than the software you pay for. For example, AV-Test.org, which is based in Germany, found that free products available online (see box) such as AVG, Avast and AntiVir detected 100 percent of the viruses out there today, just as McAfee, Norton and PC-cillin did.

Another study by AV-Test.org found that these three free programs responded to virus outbreaks faster than either Norton or McAfee.

This is why we're happy avast users.

"Free security is not something that gives people a lot of comfort," he said. The difference between free software and the stuff you pay for often comes down to the tech support available, Ham said.

Wait until he discover this forum and avast support... hehe  

[watchthisspace]

Very interresting