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Spybot And Symantec In Spyware Spat
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-10-10
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Safer Networking, the maker of Spybot-S&D, has been battling with Symantec for a year and a half over Symantec's Norton products, leading to an ultimatum calling for Symantec to leave the Anti-Spyware Coalition, or Safer Networking will depart.
 | | "There can be only one..." |  |
The Spybot-S&D product created by Patrick Kolla helps PC users find and remove spyware from their systems. It is freely available via download and has its database of spyware updated regularly.
To Kolla's ongoing dismay, Symantec products like Norton Ghost and the recently released Norton Internet Security 2007 have cited Spybot as being "incompatible" with them. The situation is all the more confusing because Symantec and Spybot are members of the Anti-Spyware Coalition, which means in theory the two should be working against "spyware and other potentially unwanted technologies."
So far it is not working out well for Kolla:
We would have loved to work with them to remove any incompatibility, but although they were eager to tell their customers about these so-called 'incompatibilities', even threats of legal action could not persuade Symantec to give us any details. Well, actually they promised they would send us details, but those promises haven't been fullfilled for nearly a year. Is Symantec's Quality Assurance department so bad that they can't either find the old reports or re-test?
Kolla also noted that arbitration as not helped the issue. "Arbitration by the ASC has only resulted in broken promises by Symantec," he wrote.
The disagreement between the competitors, one a freeware distributor and the other a massive computer security software firm in Silicon Valley, will lead to a showdown at the ASC, according to Kolla:
We will therefore bring a motion in front of the ASC to expel Symantec for damaging the ASC through its practices of illegal improper competition and libel, resulting even in malware creators being able to spread their malware better. Should this motion be rejected by a majority of ASC members, we most likely leave this coalition as it would then appear that ASC is favoring libel as a proper way of competition.
It is unfortunate that the situation has come to a likely ultimatum, one that is difficult to believe will go Spybot's way. I have used Spybot in conjunction with Lavasoft's AdAware in my previous life in IT and found Spybot worked very well. Computer users would be better off if Symantec and Spybot could resolve the accusation of incompatibilities and move forward from this.
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Tags: Spybot, Symantec, Spyware
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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