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Microsoft to release free antivirus PC software

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Free, huh? How long until they release a "full" version that we have to pay $60 a month to get?

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kokorocloud: it's called business...

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Totally not disputing that, but because it's free, it's hard to have any faith that it will be useful. So when any one sticks the free tag on software, I'm wary.

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Get a Mac

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Use Linux ($0)

Business? you mean the business they're losing more like. There is no reason why any corporate system should have windows any more. None. Save your money.

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I, for one, welcome our new Microsoft overlords. If it makes life harder for the bad guys, I am all for it.

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Are there still people not using anti virus eh ?

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"the latest malicious programs"

What the heck is wrong with some people?

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I'm with Sarge. Seriously, what possesses someone to go out of their way to make a perfect stranger's life miserable by writing malicious code?

The temptation to deliver a well-placed kick to the nether region of one -- or all -- of these jerks would be irresistable.

Good on Microsoft for providing a solution to flaw in their own product.

Quite honestly, I find it hard to sympathize with companies like Symantec and Norton. After all, they wouldn't be in business in the first place if it weren't for the vulnerabilities in IE. Their whining is akin to home security companies petitioning home builders to stop making houses with stronger doors and windows.

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LFRAgain, you'll have to ask the employees at Microsoft who wrote Windows.

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Use Linux. I have no sympathy for businesses loosing millions of dollars or even going bankrupt because of virus attacks. Their IT department should have known better, and do a better job at convincing wood-headed bosses that Linux is the way to go.

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The windows vs mac vs linux discussion has very little to do with this topic.

I downloaded and installed this microsoft anti-virus yesterday. It didn't find anything, but I haven't decided yet whether to keep it or not. Until now I've been using AVG Free, which is not bad, considering the price.

BTW the provided link doesn't work, this one should: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/?mkt=en-us

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PleasureGelf - of course it has everything to do with this topic - like somebody else said already, there is absolutely no reason businesses shoud stick with the buggy vulnerable Microsoft products, especially when you could get much better ones for free. And no, Microsoft should not have released this stupid antivirus, BUT should have improved their systems to such extent that it does not need and antivirus to begin with.

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There's already free anti-virus solutions for those who use Windows. AVG Free. Who would pay for bloated McAfee or Symantec products when you can get the same thing, better, free?

(Of course Linux is completely free and more secure than Windows, but that's a different story)

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if it free i welcome it. market with a lot of competition is good for consumer and the developing of the market itself anyway.

and in anti virus industry, i think nothing can be worse than symantec norton. it act like virus slowdown the system, and sometime hazard when remove too.

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"you'll have to ask the employees at Microsoft who wrote Windows."

Heh! Made me spill my coffee with that. ;-)

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"There's already free anti-virus solutions for those who use Windows. AVG Free."

You know, I tried AVG Free for quite a while, and quite honestly, it bogged my system down. I ended up uninstalling it and my computer saw better performance immediately.

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Avast is an okay free one. I haven't had any major viruses since I've had it running on my machine, and it's been five or six years now. The only problem is random little spyware still gets through, and you have to have more than one program to get rid of all that tripe. It makes me sick that you have to go this far just to protect your own stuff, because some idiot in a dark basement somewhere thinks it's hilarious to put people through utter misery with their creations.

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Microsoft have released free antivirus programs. Then they started to charge for them. Then, I suppose, nobody bought them. Does that mean this is a repackaged Windows Defender?

If Microsoft designed more secure products, there would be less need for antivirus software.

As Pawatan says, there is good, free antivirus software already. I use Avira.

When you consider Microsoft's security (or lack of) history, why would anyone use their security solution?

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If Microsoft designed more secure products, there would be less need for antivirus software.

This is a false assumption and widespread misconception.

1) If hackers didn't spend an inordinate amount of time writing code to crack Internet Explorer, we wouldn’t see so many problems.

2) If IE wasn’t on 90% of computers across the planet, hackers would waste their time trying to crack it. They’d go after another big target, say, Mac.

Case in point, at a recent hackers expo, the security of three major browsers were tested and hackers were encouraged to write code that could crack IE, Safari, and the new Google Chrome. Turns out Safari was the easiest to crack.

The only reason Safari doesn’t experience more malicious code is NOT because the programmers at Mac are an entirely different class of geniuses, light years ahead of their peers at Microsoft. It’s because Mac is still small fry for the big ambitions of hackers with a hankering for making huge splashes in the computer world to mitigate the cursed of being endowed with infinitesimally tiny penises.

The vulnerabilities in IE aren’t as much bad programming as they are implementations of code to make the web browsing experience better for users that don't or can't take into account every permutation of the worst people have to offer. There is no such thing as the perfectly invulnerable system. Given time, resources, and a desire, hackers can crack just about anything out there. It's these same asshats who get their kicks out of exploiting a company’s simple desire to provide a product that has real functionality, which leaves us with a browser that requires a security suite to be piggybacked on top of it.

Inefficient? Yes. Annoying? Probably. But put the blame where it belongs: On asshat hackers.

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