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by wyday 6190 days ago
Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives. This is a very bad thing for small companies releasing desktop software.

Plus, have you used Symantec Endpoint Protection? It uses 8 megabytes of memory. Tiny.
4 comments
michaelawill 6190 days ago
People test antivirus software by throwing a certain number of virii at it and seeing what percentage of those are detected. This is their detection rate.

Just because Antivirus A detects 99% and Antivirus B detects 85% does not mean users of Antivirus A can expect more false positives. If anything, the better designed software should yield less.

Also: Yes, I have used endpoint protection. It's forced onto my work laptop at the office. It has a tendency to KILL my systems performance randomly, even when not performing a scheduled scan. 8mb of ram, while impressive for a symantec process, is simply an arbitrary number if any type of disk access gets slowed down by the service.

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MoeDrippins 6190 days ago
> Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives.

Awesome, so the machine I have with NO AV software at all with a detection rate of 0 must be the bestest!

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wyday 6190 days ago
That's obviously not what I meant. Read my comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=688388
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mahmud 6190 days ago
It uses 6 megabytes of memory

1) That's just the loader; it forks other crap.

2) I wouldn't be surprised if Symantec was hooking the OS API to report smaller footprint or gaming the profiling infrastructure in another way. Crap like that has been going on since the 80s.

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wyday 6190 days ago
You're right, it forks a couple more processes. It comes to a total of 8 megs, not 6. I should've checked that the first time.

Still pretty tiny.

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SwellJoe 6190 days ago
Higher detection rates just means more false positives.

Or better detection of viruses.

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wyday 6190 days ago
Ideally, yes. And that's certainly how companies are marketing their free AVs. The reality is that before we started signing all of our software, the free AVs detected it as a virus.

It's bad for business when you have to defend your product as not a virus (on top of trying to sell it!)

I wrote about it 2 years ago: http://wyday.com/blog/2007/useful-instantupdate-feedback/

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