Re: [h-e-w] Emacs 24.0.93 Pretest Windows Binaries published

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > You are right: this is a false alarm.  Let Symantec people know about
 > it, and ask them to get their act together.

That's hopeless, especially since we're now up to about 3 maybe 4 such
false alarms (ie, from different Wolf-Crying Peter companies).

(1) They'll say "better safe than sorry," and guess what? they're
    right! (as far as that goes, see (2)).

(2) It's impossible for anybody but Microsoft to truly get the act
    together, because the 3rd party virus checkers have to look for
    "signatures" in the content.  This is so that software whose whole
    selling point is "you don't need to know squat to use this because
    it's all automatic" can continue to oh-so-conveniently
    automatically run pretty much anything you download off the
    InterSewer.  False positives are pretty much inevitable with this
    technology.

And they're only going to only become more common, since viruses are
proliferating at the rate of what, about 1000 new variants a day?

I think you're just going to have to grin and bear this, because the
only alternative that's acceptable to the vast majority of Windows
customers is not safe 'nets, it's what Richard likes to call
"treacherous computing".  Let's pray that that does not become The
Final Solution.

But maybe Ted Z and GnuTLS can save the day.  GnuTLS is universally
applicable security for the network I hear! ;-)