[600MRG] Virus issues

[Murray Greenman]

Dick,
One of the biggest problems for small-time software developers, such as 
us, is that of having the software 'seized' by poorly designed virus 
checkers. I've had that happen here. It's the free checkers that seem to 
be worst in this respect.

There are three main types of checkers, and you may not know which you 
have. The worst type is the 'history' type, which keeps a list of 
'approved' software and a list of 'known bad' software. If new 
unrecognised software comes along which isn't registered with the virus 
checker, it will be rejected and quarantined without any sensible 
checking, so anything new from a small-time developer has no chance at 
all.

A second type, the heuristic type, runs a whole lot of different 
strategies to determine whether the program is infected. They can be 
effective, but again make life difficult for the small-time developer.

The third type, which I call the 'signature' type, keep a huge library 
of code snippets or signatures of code, which they compare against new 
programs. This type is the most reliable, but tend to be slow to 
recognise new problems unless there are frequent updates. The best 
commercial virus checkers are generally of this type. They should not 
reject new software just because it's not recognised, but it is 
important to keep them updated.

So (knowing that WSQCall is definitely not infected as posted on the web 
site), I suggest you change or update your virus checker. There's a 
really good way to achieve a consensus between virus checkers, and this 
also will inform your choice of which virus checker to install. If you 
submit the file in question to www.virustotal.com, it will report what a 
whole range of different virus checkers think of the file. This will not 
only be able to confirm for you if the file is OK, but can be quite 
revealing about which virus checkers report false positives.

You may also be able to set your virus checker to not check the folder 
in which WSQCall resides, but it would be much better to replace the 
checker with a more reliable one.

73,
Murray ZL1BPU


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