AngryPets Blog

Anti Virus Stupidity

I think most people should run memory resident Anti-virus programs. I don't, because I practice 'safe computing.'

That said, my dad and I were talking the other day about one terribly stupid feature of Anti-Virus Software: Checking your email before it goes out. Hey, I get it. The concept makes perfect sense: Check outgoing emails as a form of protection for the end user, so that they never have to hear: "Hey, you sent me a legit email, I let it in, and it had a virus -- YOU contaminated ME."

That sounds good on paper. But since we're on a piece of paper, let's use the pencil to draw a little picture shall we? The picture would look like a box. And we could label it: My computing environment. Then draw an arrow from inside the box to outside of the box, and label it: outgoing stuff. The idea here, is that you want your virus scanner to catch outgoing virii to stop you from spreading them right? With me so far? Good.

Question: This outgoing stuff that is soooo bad? How did it get on your box in the first place? Wasn't the AV supposed to block it from getting on your box? And if it missed it getting on to the box, we're supposed to believe it would catch it LEAVING the box?

Like I said... it's an AV stupidity.

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