🚀 go-pugleaf

>From:    Y. Radai <RADAI@HUJIVMS.BITNET>
>
>  Among Ross Greenberg's points in his reply last week to Padgett
>Peterson was the following:

>>...[my discussion on FLU_SHOT+'s integrity checking]

>  Sorry, but I just can't pass over that without comment.

Oh.  It's *you* again.  <grin>  Just when I thought it was safe to go back
into the water.  <theme music to _Jaws_ in the background>

>  (No offense meant, Ross, but I'm sure it won't come as a surprise to
>you if I mention that in my opinion, a good example of poor product
>quality despite presumably good sales figures is the integrity-check-
>ing feature of FLU_SHOT+.  But since I've discussed FSP enough in the
>past, I won't repeat my arguments unless someone asks.)

To paraphrase your past arguments for the readership, I believe you commented
that FSP's installation was such a pain in the butt that few people used
the integrity checking feature FSP includes.  You're probably right there,
by the way.  I would hope that *quality* of the product is not an issue.
We might have some disagreements as to whether "fast 'checksumming'" is
better or worse than "complex 'checksumming'", but that's a good debate
to have in September during the Virus Bulletin's Seminar -- over a coupla
beers, I hope.  (Hey! Could you bring me a bottle of Macabee? Love it, can't
get it here.  Bring one for Ken, too!)

Quality is an issue that the market does decide, I think. Effectiveness is
something that may or may not be related to marketshare.  But the market
does not buy low-quality products (unless it comes from my competetion,
of course. :-) ).  They may end up buying slicker *quality* products
than less slick quality products, though.

>>Resident integrity checking, and access control, is a worthy goal of
>>any of the anti-virus products. However, remember that it can and
>>*will* be circumvented the first time somebody boots off a floppy.
>
>  That does not have to be true; details in a couple of weeks.

This I look forward to hearing more about.  Typical security that would
prevent this would be either a)playing with the partition record, easily
circumvented by a decent disk editor or b)encryption of the disk to
prevent circumvention of a).  I thought about crypting the disk and
realized that I couldn;t afford the liability insurance.....

Another option would be in hardware, one I'm starting to think more and
more carefully about...

L'itrot

Ross