http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-re ... ?t=1006623
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-re ... #r15942208
TLDR?
AVG is a product from Grisoft that is roughly equivalent to Norton or McAfee antivirus.
It is one of a handful of virus scanners that are free for personal use, and is therefore quite popular.
A recent update to the software included functionality that is on by default. This functionality effectively visited every link on every page you visited and checked it for viruses. This is bad.
1) Your bandwidth gets used in the process. Do a Google search and visit 1 website? You will have actually visited a dozen in the process.
2) Everyone else's bandwidth gets wasted. The result is analogous to the slashdot effect (primarily due to visiting links on search engines); the millions of users of AVG were visiting links they'd never normally visit, at a rate they'd never normally click. The result is that many sites have served pages to nobody at all, but have to pay the costs of doing so.
This is Very Significant (to put it another way: if our website were linked to more popular search terms, the AVG effect would have brought it down. We were lucky. And not very popular.).
3) Statistics get messed up. This is also more important than many people think - web development is an industry still in its infancy and there are many, many bad websites out there that don't work the way they should. When AVG brought this little horror into being, it was spamming sites with fake visits and announcing itself as Internet Explorer 6.0
Advertisers don't need this. Responsible developers don't need this. Webmasters sure as hell do not need this.
The world does not need to think that IE6 is any more popular than it unfortunately already is.
If you are a user of AVG, I respectfully request that you replace it with another antivirus package.
Although Grisoft have finally gone back on their ludicrous decision, such an act was inexcusable from a company who is responsible for security software.
I don't use antivirus software myself, but I don't encourage anyone else to be so utterly stupid (do as I say, not as I do); look into Avira or Avast if you want something free.
If you're prepared to pay, take a look at the packages offered by Eset. I would direct you away from Norton or any of the other "big" AV providers, as their product usually does more performance harm than good.
Don't even think about Panda. If you have to ask, you must have very good spam protection.
If you insist on still using AVG, then at the very least disable the functionality - it is discussed in the threads I've linked, and as a last resort, I can guide you through it.
Thanks,
Cart
My (late) addition to the AVG shitstorm
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Cartollomew
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Last edited by Cartollomew on 14 Jul 2008, 17:12, edited 1 time in total.
Who do you think you are? If you'd stopped winning, you could have been the Biggest Loser, if you gave up, you could have been a Survivor, if you'd stopped reading Orwell, you could have been on Big Brother!
Don't get me started either Cart, AVG8 is a cluster fuck. I liked 7.5 and wasn't really worried about 8 until I started looking at the fucker more closely.
Took me less than 2 hours to turn off the Linkscanner. It's easy to remove on an individual basis, but removing it via the centralised system is somewhat harder. I'm really glad they're back tracking, but I think the damage is done for me.
Other things that's pissed me off:
1) It's fucking browser bar. Why does every product need one now? Who the fuck cares enough to have AV information as a bar in their browser? Why does it NOT install by default on a manual install but DOES install on an automated push out? This little fucker, along with the Linkscanner, has really put me off AVG.
2) Performance... It's real time scanner blows out the start up of a MSI by minutes. A software application called TRIM Context with the real time scanner on takes a good 6 minutes to get to the first screen. Off it takes all of 20 second.
WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SHIT!?
3) Slow ass scans. 7 hours later and still going.
Three strikes, you're fucking out, time to move on.
Took me less than 2 hours to turn off the Linkscanner. It's easy to remove on an individual basis, but removing it via the centralised system is somewhat harder. I'm really glad they're back tracking, but I think the damage is done for me.
Other things that's pissed me off:
1) It's fucking browser bar. Why does every product need one now? Who the fuck cares enough to have AV information as a bar in their browser? Why does it NOT install by default on a manual install but DOES install on an automated push out? This little fucker, along with the Linkscanner, has really put me off AVG.
2) Performance... It's real time scanner blows out the start up of a MSI by minutes. A software application called TRIM Context with the real time scanner on takes a good 6 minutes to get to the first screen. Off it takes all of 20 second.
WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SHIT!?
3) Slow ass scans. 7 hours later and still going.
Three strikes, you're fucking out, time to move on.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ soak rifts or riot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯