Norton Anti-Virus is itself a virus that makes it impossible to maintain your computer without paying a yearly rent to Symantec and has only middling effectiveness at its purported purpose.
Don’t pay? Your computer crashes and you have to wipe it and re-install the operating system.
pcAnywhere is malware that allows remote users to hijack your machine.
It was Symantec and their police handlers who introduced money into the equation.
I encourage you to download a torrent today and leave it to seed. Free Download Manager is not only free, but superior. It also offers a BitTorrent client that you can selectively turn off and on and resumable downloads and error correction.
Anonymous: Symantec Offered $50K for Stolen Code, Plus a Lie
By Mark Hachman, PC World
February 6, 2012 08:36pm EST
Members of the Anonymous network released an email thread on Monday that claims that Symantec offered $50,000 in return for the guaranteed destruction of code tied to its pcAnywhere and Norton Antivirus tools.
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The group said later that the code would be released. Separately, Anonymous released emails from the legal team who represented Frank Wuterich, the staff sergeant who led an assault on the Iraqi city of Haditha that left 24 unarmed civilians dead.According to the email chain, Sam Thomas, an employee of Symantec, began negotiations with “Yamatough,” a member of the Lords of Dharmaraja group using a Venezuelan email address, on or about Jan. 18. According to the emails, Symantec asked Yamatough and the group to lie about having accomplished an earlier 2006 hack, which obtained the code.
Hackers sought $50,000 from Symantec for anti-virus blueprint
By Frank Jack Daniel, Reuters
Tue Feb 7, 2012 3:46am EST
An email exchange released by the hacker, who is known as YamaTough and claims to be based in Mumbai, India, shows drawn-out negotiations with a purported Symantec employee starting on January 18.
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“In exchange, you will make a public statement on behalf of your group that you lied about the hack.”The hacker said he never intended to take the money and warned he would soon release the blueprints for Symantec’s pcAnywhere and Norton antivirus products.
“We tricked them into offering us a bribe so we could humiliate them,” YamaTough told Reuters.
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Peter sold it.
I remember years ago with Windows 3.1, I purchased Norton Anti-Virus, and they would send me a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk in snail mail every quarter to install. Occasionally there was an extra disk for a major virus outbreak.
Then, through the years, their software became so bloated that it slowed down the machines, and heaven forbid you had a problem with one of their softwares, it always, always, always required wiping the hard drive and reinstalling Windows, all your apps and “Norton.”
That’s how I learned to partition one physical hard drive and keep my data on the second drive, since I went through so much crap with Norton, so if I ever had to reinstall the operating system and apps, I could do so just on only half the drive and not have to worry about my data.
Anyway, right now I use NOD32 by Eset. It’s an award-winning piece of software, and it has a really small footprint.
I have four licenses, and granted, I pay each year or rather a couple years in advance to get a discount, but it’s a service, just like any other that I pay for, so I don’t mind. Rather be safe than… you know.