falter - 1:48 am on Nov 19, 2005 (gmt 0)

These moves are coming from the wrong direction. They're just going to eliminate one of the several vectors that spyware actually gets onto sytstems.

As much as I like Spybot and Ad-Aware, their existence, I belive, has a negative effect on the end user. Many of the major anti-virus companies sell an anti-spyware add-on component to compete with the Ad-Awares and Spybots of the world. The anti-virus industry's refusal to put spyware protections into their already sophisticated anti-virus engines allows for the anti-spyware market.

A glance at this page [spywarewarrior.com] shows that, users are looking to anyone who claims to be anti-spyware to get protections, and this trust is being abused (often, no protections are offered at all, and spyware is installed instead). This is all due to the lack of a pro-user stance from the AV industry; instead, they chose to first ignore the existence of spyware, and later on, take advantage of the situation by selling a product that people won't want to pay for since they can't differentiate between the good scanners and the bad. Users just know that they probably don't want to pay for it.

I think that what's needed most is for the anti-virus industry to stop tip-toeing around the issues that surround spyware, bite the bullet, and do the job that we all pay them for: to keep stuff we don't want off our computers. People know that they need to have anti-virus software on their computers; they're basically given it when they buy the computer. If the big dogs (symantic/norton, mcafee, etc) start protecting against spyware with their anti-virus engines, all the other anti-virus vendors will follow suit, and the spyware industry will finally begin to crumble.

~mike