Re: [h-e-w] Emacs 24.0.93 Pretest Windows Binaries published

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Cc: "Richard M. Heiberger" <rmh@temple.edu>,
>     cschol2112@googlemail.com,
>     emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:03:29 +0900
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
>  > You are right: this is a false alarm.  Let Symantec people know about
>  > it, and ask them to get their act together.
> 
> That's hopeless, especially since we're now up to about 3 maybe 4 such
> false alarms (ie, from different Wolf-Crying Peter companies).
> 
> (1) They'll say "better safe than sorry," and guess what? they're
>     right! (as far as that goes, see (2)).
> 
> (2) It's impossible for anybody but Microsoft to truly get the act
>     together, because the 3rd party virus checkers have to look for
>     "signatures" in the content.  This is so that software whose whole
>     selling point is "you don't need to know squat to use this because
>     it's all automatic" can continue to oh-so-conveniently
>     automatically run pretty much anything you download off the
>     InterSewer.  False positives are pretty much inevitable with this
>     technology.

Is all this based on facts or on assumptions?  IOW, did you ever
report such problems to Symantec, and got the above as response?

I don't know about Symantec (don't use their products), but with AVG
it works as expected: you submit the offending file for their
analysis, via the GUI of the antivirus program, and get an email
notification, usually within hours, saying that it's a false alarm;
and the virus database is updated within a couple of days accordingly.

So if Symantec is really behaving like you describe, their users
should simply find a better product.