by LongRunner » May 24th, 2013, 3:48 pm
lti on Badcaps.net forums said that MSE removes hosts file entries without asking permission or telling you about it.
I'm never going to put an antimalware tool without an override on my system (as far as I remember, that includes McAfee).
McAfee is designed around the demographic knowing very little about computers and that would freak out at the very presence of a virus warning, so they'd rather say something reassuring (even if it means silently modifying the HDD contents) than ask the user a question they wouldn't know how to answer. They can't test against obscure freeware programs, of course, and I use a lot of those, for the record. The absence of an override is done to make it "idiot-proof". Kinda like smoke detectors - most people (including me) have had the ear-piercing experience of the detector over-reacting and alarming for no good reason, but they won't document how to adjust the sensitivity (or the volume, for that matter), because that would mean the next person who sets it all the way down, gets taken out in a fire, and has their family sue for failure to respond would make the smoke detector manufacturers look irresponsible for even providing user settings.
It's more about prevention than cure, after all. I wouldn't expect anyone who buys into rogue security software to be safe no matter how good the real scanner on their system is.
Information is far more fragile than the HDDs it's stored on.
Smart people don't buy "smart" devices without very carefully weighing up the risks and benefits beforehand.
My PC: Core i3 4130 on GA-H87M-D3H with GT640 OC 2GiB and 2 * 8GiB Kingston HyperX 1600MHz, Kingston SA400S37120G, WD3003FZEX-00Z4SA0 and HDS721010CLA630, Pioneer BDR-209DBKS and Optiarc AD-7200S, Seasonic G-360, Chenbro PC31031, Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.2 (with Windows 7 still accessible if needed).
