Re: Another new worm???

[crispin () WIREX COM (Crispin Cowan)]

aleph1 () securityfocus com wrote:

> > Dan:  do you have any comment on why commercial AV vendors charge for the
> > initial product and give away the service, instead of the other way around?
>
> In my experience, most AV companies charge a subscription fee now a days. You
> get a one year free subscription with the product and must pay after that.
> So you are basically paying for both the product and the service.

I've been using Norton AV for NT for my VMWare machine.  Because I don't let
NT anywhere near the Internet :-) I have to go to the web and manually download
my updates from the Norton site via Netscape/Linux.  If you go to this site
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/cgi-bin/navsarc.cgi it appears to not have any
kind of authentication required to download the update file (which is just a .exe
that you run to update your profiles).

So they may be *intending* to charge me for the service, but they're not
achieving that :-)

Crispin

--
Crispin Cowan, CTO, WireX Communications, Inc.    http://wirex.com
Free Hardened Linux Distribution:                 http://immunix.org
        Security JOB:  http://immunix.org/jobs.html