Avast Antivirus was giving a false positive on ACDSee 15 today, which was a minor annoyance, because by doing so, ACDSee's automatic camera offloading feature was disabled. I fixed everything and researched the issue, discovering a thread of messages on Avast's forum complaining about the false positive. I disabled all of Avast's shields until the next reboot, which might be a week from now, figuring they will fix their database by that time.
I have a couple of thoughts about this issue. One, Avast does not normally give false positives; this is an anomaly. I recommend Avast for a reason. Two, Avast shows laxity in regards to testing. It may be that they are releasing their database updates far, far too soon, and should test the damn things a bit better than they do. I am not sure virus database updates--or any system updates, for that matter--should be made in such a hellfire hurry. How about slowing down, letting a few systems have it, and seeing what the results are? Three, I'm not a paying customer of Avast, nor are the vast majority, so do we have a right to complain? Yes, because this is a free country, but Avast also has a right not to give a damn. It may be that Avast unleashes a false positive on purpose once in a while to scare the gullible into buying some of their product. Microsoft offers free antivirus, so I do not understand Avast's business model at all. I do not understand why anyone would pay for an antivirus when they can get one for free. At the moment, I am considering uninstalling Avast and installing Microsoft's solution, because Avast does like to be annoying with their little pop-ups and now a false positive.
2 comments:
Third party security software is full of false positives. While this may be the first you've seen from Avast, it is certainly not their first error - and not their last. Third party security software is useless - it rarely protects you against any real threat, and its primary interest is in scaring users by detecting benign threats so that they can sell more licenses. Now that the more conservative (less prone to false positives) and efficient Windows Defender (Microsoft Security Essentials) is built into Windows 8, there's no reason to use this trash.
Yes, I believe you're right. Mere habit keeps me using Avast, that and years of virus-free computing. Another provocation in the form of a false positive would see me uninstall Avast, but I might also do it just because. Many of the new features of Avast seem to me dubious mere annoyances, and I wonder if all the added bloat slows the computer down.
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