On 2/8/2004 4:46 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:
In this past year's tour of my friends and family, I've taken to removing their antivirus software at the same time I remove their spyware, and I've taken to installing Mozilla (with its IMAP client) as a way to keep the machine from having any dependency on anti-virus software.
I switched to Communicator (and then Mozilla) a long time ago, and I also use older versions of Word or alternative products that are less prone to worms/viruses. I also run anti-virus scans on my mail server. But I still use virus checkers locally and I don't think it's a good idea for folks to be discounting their usefulness. There are too many other paths for infection -- web downloads, infected CD-ROMs (yes this still happens), and so forth. If performance is a problem then scan writes only, instead of writes+reads (you won't get infected if you scan every write to disk, while scanning reads is only going to produce a hit if you are already infected). -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/