AOLSP Scheduler.exe Recommendation : |
At the time of writing, 18-Jul-2004, (note 2008 July update later in this write-up) we have some reservations about AOL Spyware Protection and our main reservation is that it is made by Aluria Software whose own anti-spyware offerings think, in some versions, at the time of writing, that our product, The Ultimate Troubleshooter, is spyware and as a result prevent it from opening !! Basically, unlike with antivirus software, we believe that most anti-spyware programs are not yet safe enough to be run in the background and unattended. Our reasons for this are that in this day and age of Internet enabled software, there are hundreds of safe programs out there which communicate over the Internet legitimately and which are not spyware. Yet, from our experience and our research there are few anti-spyware programs which are rigorous enough in their research to have a very high degree of accuracy in only ever targeting known spyware programs and tasks and never making guesses. SpyBot is one such program in our opinion, but there are others. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, Aluria Software's anti-spyware products are not products we would trust to run in the background and unattended. The last thing you want is to find that a program that is important to you, and which is actually safe, has been incorrectly identified as spyware, and disabled, and you have no idea that that is what happened because it ran in the background and you did not check the results. Our recommendation, therefore, is that you disable automatic spyware protection scanning within AOL, disable this task on the Startups tab, and simply manually run the AOL Spyware Protection as necessary. How often you should do this depends on how often you download and install from the Internet, how often you open emails from unknown sources, and whether you use file sharing programs such as KaZaA. Note : On 20-Jul-2004, the Director of Operations of Aluria Software swiftly acknowledged to us that Aluria Software was indeed incorrectly identifying some components of The Ultimate Troubleshooter as adware/spyware, and indicated that the problem would be resolved in updates later in the same week. He also stated "False positives do occur with the best programs out there including antivirus programs, it is not a case of guesswork but unfortunate similarity". Aluria's Director of Operations then named a few products which have recently had the same problem. At this point, from experience, we disagree. After a careful initial selection, years ago we used to use Dr Solomon AntiVirus both in-house and at our corporate customers, and never experienced a single "false positive" in years of usage. Then Dr Solomon got bought out and, alas, we experienced such nightmares with the product within a month or two of it having been bought out, that we had to move to a different product. This time, again after a careful and lengthy evaluation of all leading products on the market, we homed in on Norton AntiVirus. Well, in the 5+ years since we have used it, in-house and at our corporate customers, we have not once experienced a single "False Positive". Not once ! Sure, we have had the occasional problems with the product, rectified with updates, but not once have we had Norton AntiVirus identify a legitimate program as a virus or spyware/adware. In 2007, after testing it for a year, we decided to move to AVG as Norton were starting to overload their antivirus products with so many features that Norton AntiVirus became a drag on resources. In July 2008, in the year and a half that we have used AVG, it has not given a single false positive. If Dr Solomon can do it, if Norton AntiVirus can do it, if AVG can do it, then our view is that that has to be the yardstick for this particular industry. |
