April 21, 2010
Amazing. What a screw up.
We're hearing from all over that a bad McAfee for Windows XP update is causing computers worldwide to shut down. Apparently DAT update 5958 deletes the svchost.exe file, which then triggers a false-positive in McAfee itself and sets off a chain of uncontrolled restarts and loss of networking functionality.
And, of course, it was auto-downloaded by most of those machines, because McAfee's antivirus package nags you incessantly if you disable auto-download.
Word is that the only fix McAfee can come up with requires service staff to manually fix each and every computer which was involved. I'm sure that corporate IT departments are overjoyed.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at
12:06 PM
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Post contains 116 words, total size 1 kb.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 21, 2010 12:26 PM (/ppBw)
-j
Posted by: J Greely at April 21, 2010 12:43 PM (fpXGN)
There is, of course, no way for us users to shut down McAfee virus scanning on our PCs.
When Deacon told me "McAfee is going away soon," he neglected to mention it would be in a blaze of stupidity.
Posted by: ubu at April 21, 2010 12:53 PM (i7ZAU)
News reports about who was affected by it have included at least one police department and one hospital. Just great publicity, you know...
Mr. McAfee himself, it turns out, is currently living like a native in Belize, trying to do good works.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 21, 2010 01:08 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Siergen at April 21, 2010 01:21 PM (0Rm2P)
...when I learned that, nothing in this universe could have convinced me to keep using McAfee or to use it ever again.
I've been using Avast! ever since. Perfectly happy with it.
Posted by: atomic_fungus at April 21, 2010 03:54 PM (Pm3HF)
Enclose all spoilers in spoiler tags:
[spoiler]your spoiler here[/spoiler]
Spoilers which are not properly tagged will be ruthlessly deleted on sight.
Also, I hate unsolicited suggestions and advice. (Even when you think you're being funny.)
At Chizumatic, we take pride in being incomplete, incorrect, inconsistent, and unfair. We do all of them deliberately.
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