Windows Live OneCare Can Eat Your Email 204
FutureDomain writes in to point us to a blog sponsored by PC Magazine, reporting about another problem with Windows Live OneCare. Apparently, it sometimes deletes the entire Outlook or Outlook Express .PST mailbox when it finds a virus in one of the messages. The only solution is to tell OneCare to exclude the entire Outlook mailbox. This is the software that came in last in antivirus tests. The trail of tears is ongoing over on the Microsoft forums.
OneCare deletes nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Then, get a good AV package - or better yet, just exercise some fucking common sense and don't open that "Re: Malaca Superfund Stranded" email from "Roberta Plantagenet~=%" that has a "postcard.exe" attachment.
Re:trail of tears? (Score:5, Informative)
Stop tagging all MS-related articles defective... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, Microsoft has a lot of DRMed software, with Vista being the granddaddy of them all, but not everything Microsoft makes is defective by design. And in this particular case, the defect appears to be a bug rather than intentional anyway. So, please, save the "defectivebydesign" tag for situations where it's really warranted. Sure, it may be an amusing term, but when you use it where it doesn't apply, it waters down its meaning for the situation it was intended to be applied to: DRM.
Counter example : AVG free (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And they say FOSS doesn't get professional test (Score:1, Informative)
I disagree with both assertions.
First, because there are more people testing, does not mean it gets more "intense" testing. The FOSS mentality is, "I will code up this patch, test it, then submit it." How many of those developers do you really think are rigorous in their testing? Does someone say, developer X tested these situations, I think I will add a test for this? Do they even tell each other what was tested, or does everyone re-invent the wheel? Did they test all of the boundary / corner tests? Every degenerate case? Every mind0numbingly boring condition? Or did they just test the easy stuff over and over again? Did their tests just consist of "Works For Me"?
Second, are there actually more people testing? Do you think that there are people with watches on the code tree just salivating for a chance to write test cases for other people's code? If they test other's work at all, it's going to be because they found a fault caused by someone else being sloppy, and that fault led to a failure while they were using the program... the exact same sequence that causes a user to submit a bug report to a closed source product.
RAV (Score:2, Informative)
It was a very good antivirus program developed by Gecad, a romanian company. It had support for Linux, BSDs, Solaris and it was highly appreciated in its days. It's so sad that Microsoft killed [infoworld.com] this fine product, removing support for rival platforms and turning it into this lame thing called Onecare.
Re:trail of tears? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually a recent version of Thunderbird would in fact hose your email.
Apparently a bug crept in that when Thunderbird's spam detector detected a certain kind of spam, it proceeded to mark ALL the mail in the mailbox for deletion on the next compaction.
For those people who compact on exit, that was seriously bad news.
However, the fix was also easy - since all mail is in text files rather than proprietary binary formats. You simply dumped the Thunderbird release with the bug and downgraded to the last release. Then you opened your mail in a text editor and did a search and replace of a single simple code in each email. Takes you a few minutes to fix.
And of course back up your email outside of your profile to be sure.
Compare that to the Outlook 2GB file limit bug - where you can't access your email or anything else in your PST file until you download a tool from Microsoft that chops off fifty MB from the file so you can open it again.
Just brilliant, that one.
Way to go, Bill - you MORON!
Quarantine not Delete (Score:3, Informative)
This is being misreported all across the Web even though the linked article in every case makes it clear.
It's a serious flaw certainly and still more bad press for Vista, but this one is not nearly as severe as issues like DRM and Certificate-only drivers in Vista - it doesn't deserve the same level of press.