The Recursive ISV

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Well.  It had to happen sooner or later. ;-)  MixAction is finally completed and ready for RC1 barring some tweaking of the installer I want to do (not happy with how it handles non admin accounts presently, shouldn’t be to hard a fix tomorrow refreshed) and some last minute tweaking of template files as I’ve added a few features since I created those.

Literally did everything last night and today that remained to do inside the program.  Tomorrow I’ll do the above and then build the final installer for RC1.  Do some more quick installs in some VM’s and then let it loose on some testers.

After that I have to really get cracking on the website.  A fair bit to do there, though layout is pretty much finalized I think. 

The website at this stage will be kept simple.  I’m actually debating having the forums accessible only within the application presently.  While there are definite advantages to open and public forums there are many other issues such as forum spamming and all that lovely stuff we all loathe.

In addition I’ll be adding a blog to it related to the software in a round-about way but to Theatrical Audio stuff in general.  That’s going to be a tough call to make sure I keep posts rolling.

I’d like to take the opportunity, for the rest of this post tonight, to mention something atrocious that I think every developer reading this blog needs to know about.

McAfee’s  “Site Advisor”.  This ridiculous software package has targeted many authors I know over the last few years with their  libelous and slandering “ratings” which mark innocent website as “dangerous” and containing “malware or viruses” by virtue of those sites having a link to a download site that has been flagged by this nefarious company. 

Recently respected developer Julian Moss of Techpro was targeted (and currently still is).  What makes this even more insidious, beyond the fact he is totally innocent) is that Yahoo have signed up with McAfee to incorporate “Site Advisors” ratings into their search results.  Thus Julian’s site, which is number one for many keywords, is being shown as something to avoid.  Take a look at the screenshot below (click image to zoom):

Nice!  The potential to screw Julian’s successful business is beyond belief.  Julian has of course written to all parties - AND BEEN IGNORED!  Par for the course with McAfee and their “Site Advisor”.  Their support department is of the same caliber as the offending product clearly.  That is to say negligent, bereft and cruel.  They don’t give a damn - and you should!

From Julian’s Blog:

”

Tech-Pro.net has received a red danger warning because McAfee’s software claims to have downloaded three files containing the Winfixer virus. Without being given any notice, nor being offered any channel to challenge the allegation, McAfee’s software is defaming our business by claiming that anyone who visits our site may get infected by spyware.
The three downloads in question were all of PC Tools’ Spyware Doctor from RegNow. Spyware Doctor is one of the most highly respected anti-spyware products on the market, and RegNow is part of the Digital River Group, the leading online software reseller. Anyone with a knowledge of the software business would know this to be true, and come to the conclusion that the test result is most likely a false positive. But a lot of potential visitors to the site - people who don’t know much about computers looking for help with a problem - will not realize this, and think we are peddling spyware.”

Please do read the full details at his blog and when you get back here consider this one from Steph where he quotes from an article in the Register:

“In late February, AVG paired its updated anti-virus engine with a real-time malware scanner that vets search engine results before you click on them. If you search Google, for instance, this LinkScanner automatically visits each address that turns up on Google’s results page.”

and…

However if you have the latest version of AVG installed something else happens. You start the same way, go to Google, enter in your search term (”latest movies”) and click on the Search button. However here is where things change for the worse. AVG looks at the search results and behind the scenes starts to download each and every search result webpage. This is without you having to view or visit the webpage, it’s all happening behind the scenes.”

You can probably imagine the bandwidth this is going to cost YOU AND I AND EVERY WEBMASTER!

These anti-virus and anti-malware companies are becoming as bad as the curse they purport to cure.  Law unto themselves they don’t give a flying fig for anybodies interests except their own bottom line.  

The number of nice tools for code obfuscation etc in binaries that have been used by some moron in a spyware of malware shop and then flagged as “malware” or “virus” point blank is a case in point.  One tool I was going to purchase recently for bundling DLL’s into exe’s was so flagged - *nothing* the author did, nothing he said got them to budge on their flags.  End of product…

A false positive is one thing.  But guilt by association, as the McAfee example above implies, or “lets scan every bloody thing!” in the AVG example is just stark raving lunacy.

I would urge you to vote with your feet with these two products (and any others that pull it) by ditching them if you use them and telling others to do the same - not forgetting to tell their customer services departments *why*.

Flagging all cookies as bad was lame enough - as so many spyware scanners do - but this is beyond the pale.

UPDATE:

Thanks to Richie Hindle, commenting below on this post, for letting me know that AVG are changing their policy on this link scanning.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/07/avg_stems_fake_traffic/

Scott Kane

Quote of the day:
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores. - Terry Pratchett

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