I can't play freelancer anymore.

I have seen absolutely ZERO conclusive evidence that you’re more secure with paid AV than free AV. You’ll have to back those claims up, Timmy.

Furthermore, drive-by-downloads are what I mean by paranoid. They’re not out there for you, remember! Yes, there was a time where they could be a potential threat. That time was called “IE dominance”. Browsers such as Firefox are very safe and the likeliness of you getting such a download are near zero. As Bas said, you can get NoScript running if you want (I do it).

Last thing: you can never achieve 100% security. You need to shoot for some acceptable tradeoff between security and usability. Therein lies the entire debate: where to draw the line? I think if you’re at the point where you imagine the Internet as the far west with less rules, you might be going too far. It can be harsh, but you’re just a nobody on the highway, you’re not a valuable target to anything but botnet builders, and those use very traditional techniques (spam, bad sites).

To get infected while browsing safe sites is something so unlikely you simply cannot think about protecting yourself from it. Chances are that, if it had to happen, your protections would be worthless anyways.

i had the free version of avira for the last two and a half years, even multiple mounts without any AV software (active) and almost always a deactivated firewall. haven’t experienced yet anything, my machine even runs better than on first day. it is really a question of what web server you are accessing to. there is even a massive difference between the different google servers, where by the same targets you are being led on the one hand to trustworthy sites, forums and blogs and on the other hand to sites with illegal downloads full of adds like “we haven’t detected an AV on your harddrive - klick here!”

FriendlyFire wrote:
I have seen absolutely ZERO conclusive evidence that you’re more secure with paid AV than free AV. You’ll have to back those claims up, Timmy.

Pull the other one FF, that means you’ve either never looked or simply don’t believe the labs that test the software. Most free antivirus solutions don’t have adware or spyware detection for starters, lack the ability to decompress many file types which would be used to change the signature of known virus types, don’t have bi-directional firewalls. All you get with free AV is the ability to detect “most” acknowledged ITW (in the wild) trojans and worms etc. That represents a percentage of “known” virus types, but you’re not paying for the software so you don’t get a full library. You can bet you’re arse you’ll get more false positives with free software and a far worse detection rate.

To be paranoid about internet security would be silly if you were referring to an individual hacker specifically targetting you, but to believe that the internet is not overflowing with opportunistic parasites just looking for a meal is rediculous.

This is not even worth having an argument about, you know it as well as I do unless you’re deliberately being ignorant for the sake of a disagreement.

Ah, so you’re not talking about an antivirus at all. You do realize when I want an AV, I’m speaking of an AV? I don’t want them to attach a spyware detector, firewall, parental control, remote management and coffee maker to the mix!

I’ll get a spyware detector tool myself, I’ll get a firewall myself if I so desire. Having an all-around suite and comparing it to a strict antivirus is disingenuous. Free solutions can be found separately and perform just as well (if not better) as the built-in paid solutions.

You’re wrong about the detection rate. Many free AVs have extremely high detection rates. False positives are extremely variable and to be honest, I’d rather have a few more false positives if it means it detects more threats.

Also, your last line isn’t a good way to try to get your point across, Timmy.

to assist FF a bit: a software that is programmed for one purpose usually does its job better than if it has five jobs. however, a decompressing process is sensible to check archives for viruses, too and probably with one good tool you can manage the functions easier and faster. paying for them is ridiculous though just due to that browsing sensibly will safe you far better than any software.

anyway, its up to each user how he wants to protect his machine and whether he wants to protect it himself or to make the computer to compute its protection itself. also, whether a user wants to pay for his machine’s protection or not and whether there is anything on his machine important enough to need protection.

There is a use in AV, but little if you know how to avoid getting infected. Not using a bad browser, avoiding suspicious sites, not clicking stupid ads and having common sense when reading email from unknown sources. Last I read Kaspersky and NOD32 was the 2 best pay-for AVs.

besides, statistically most viruses are programmed to trick firefox while the safest browsers are such used rarely like opera or safari. as only a few users use them they appear to be out of interest for criminal minds.

FF. I’ve zipped up the pdf reports from AV.comparitives for you to browse through if you so wish. Plenty of data there but don’t expect to find results for crap like spybot and other mediocre pieces of software.

Filefront

And why Spybot is crap?

Gisteron, Safari is definitivly NOT very safe, at least not the windows version. That’s what I read some time ago.

Timmy51m wrote:
FF. I’ve zipped up the pdf reports from AV.comparitives for you to browse through if you so wish. Plenty of data there but don’t expect to find results for crap like spybot and other mediocre pieces of software.

Filefront

What this tells me is that Kingsoft is crap, but since it doesn’t include any free AV, there’s absolutely nothing worth discussing in there. Maybe paid AV is better, maybe it is not, but you cannot base yourself off this data to say so.

Bas, Safari is built on Webkit which is a rather safe browsing engine. Much safer than Trident at least. Obviously the best security can currently be achieved through Firefox with AdBlock Plus and NoScript, but in terms of vanilla configuration, Webkit’s on the safer side because it is a small portion of the market. IE is much more targeted and Firefox will probably be more and more as its share grows. You could expect the same from Chrome if their share keeps on growing.

Only software that had recieved certification was tested. If the software did not achieve a minimum level of security under test it didn’t get certified and it was discarded. If it is not on the list, consider it worse than Kingsoft which in your words is crap, so I figure It’s fairly safe to say so as you put it.

MS security essentials features in tests it qualifies for and does rather well, that’s free and getting better with every version. What I was attempting to illustrate is that even top notch paid for AV will let a percentage through whilst surfing, what that says to me is that it’s wise to use a fairly good piece of software if you have data on a machine that’s worth protecting. AVG will be the first to tell you that the free version of the software they provide is not near as good as the paid for, if it wasn’t who would ever pay?

Each to their own.

This thread sucks. A lot of people are talking a lot about things that, in all honesty, I don’t really believe they know that much about.

Browsers, anti-virus, firewalls - I’m not sure half of you even know what you are saying here. Before anyone jumps at me, I don’t purport to know much whatsoever, but what has been said by many people is balderdash.

Kaspersky is a very good - enough said. There are alternatives, some of which are free - enough said

Chips wrote:
This thread sucks.

You’d better explain that to the guy who’s holding a gun to your head, forcing you to read it!

It is full of inaccuracies… nuff said.

Hah!

Me use-um Spybot and SpywareBlaster.

No antivirus.

Me not have problem.

Once in blue moon me get virus, and me reformat um disk.

But me make image of um fully-loaded clean disk and all me need is um restore image on um disk only!

About 15 minutes.

See here for how: http://forums.seriouszone.com/showthread.php?55706

But last time there was no virus, only the blasted Google redirect trojan - and I found out how to fix that without restoring my disk.

I’m not telling you lot to do what I do, only telling what I am doing, and showing you how you can do if you want-um.

Me smokum virtual pipe to disappear in virtual cloud of smoke…