Just a mild rant, if I might be permitted (very mild)
Hi, Brynn. Of course you are permitted. Besides, you rant very politely.
I will attempt to address the issues you raised. Please note, however, that the comments following are my
personal observations and thoughts and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of other members of the LandzDown Team, many of whom have a "history" with Lavasoft dating to 2001
when the German company Lavasoft picked up and ran with Steve Gibson's OptOut. My own history helping users with Ad-Aware did not begin until 2003.
In my opinion, of primary concern is the 5%, ISP/Error Retrieving Update problem suddenly requiring a new software download. The error retrieving update problem is not new. Without much effort, I quickly found a topic at
Broadband Reports from 2005 and
Castle Cops from 2006. This problem has always been attributed to issues with the Lavasoft download server.
Suddenly, after almost two years, the ISP/Error Retrieving Update requires uninstalling the software and downloading a new build? In my mind, this raises serious questions.
[Side Bar: When checking the LS Forums for information on this issue, I was rather taken back to find a March 3, 2007,
forum advertisement linking to job postings for
Open Positions at Lavasoft, including Malware/Spyware Analyst and Software Developers. Coincidence? Surely this is likely. It just struck me as strange seeing a solicitation for staff on a help forum intended for computer users with malware problems. This is the type of advert that would normally be found in a professional journal not a spyware removal forum. So in my mind I start connecting dots and cannot help but speculate as to whether a personnel problem could be connected to the Def File problem and slow down of the AAW 2007 beta program.]
Back to the ISP/Error Retrieving Update issue -- putting aside any relation to the two year old problem and considering this as a new, completely unrelated issue from the download server problems, I cannot help but question what was in the Def File(s) that destroyed the ability of the software to obtain updates. That, for obvious reasons, leads to the question that if Lavasoft R&D releases Def File(s) that destroy their own software, what can it do to other valid software? Thus, the reason for my comment above, "Personally, I am a bit suspicious of a software that is broken by their own definition files."
indeed it IS "ONLY" a scanner, and provides no inherent protection directly
Well, not quite. Ad-Aware SE Plus and Pro both include Ad-Watch -- Lavasoft's real-time protection software. There has been a problem with Ad-Watch in AAW SE since it was released in August 2004. In fact, the
instruction topic that I posted on the issue is the #1 hit
in one search in almost 5,600 topics and
4th out of 18,700 topics (with my instructions linked in the #1 topic) in another search.
But the program itself has remained entirely respectable
Don't be fooled by claims of
Most Downloaded Software. Those figures are cummulative over the lifetime of being hosted there -- through all versions, new builds, replacement downloads, etc. Consider the issue of the
Authenticity Check -- a software add-on that has been beta since the issue was exposed
last year by a member of ASAP, who also
disputed the validity of the beta software. More recently there was
my own question of privacy. Although this was "explained" by a LS staff member, it still does not match Lavasoft's own privacy policy, and that from a company reputed to helping users protect their privacy. Something doesn't compute there. Follow that with the
Swedish Tax Authority problems. Reading translations of the linked articles in that thread suggests the possibility of deeper issues with regard to employee salaries & benefits. Then there is the history of employees suddenly apparently discovering they may no longer be employed. See
here and the followup
here of one example (note that person is obviously a talented developer and is now employed by a highly respected antivirus software company).
Is there some 'up and coming' new program on the horizon, which out-performs this steady, old, reliable workhorse?
The collective "we" (members of the security community) have always noted that no one antispyware software will always have all variants of malicious ware. Besides, what used to be considered an issue toward privacy (tracking cookies and "most recently used") is pretty tame compared to what is landing on computers these days. That said, consider that Windows Defender includes free real-time protection; WinPatrol (definitely on my home PC!) and the detection/removal capabilities of AVG Anti-Spyware have proven very successful.
