[beetone]

The financial institution which I use for on-line banking recently amended their User Agreement. Customers using their on-line service are required to confirm that they have installed anti-virus software, as a condition of continuing to use on-line access.
I wonder if this is a trend in the industry or is my institution an anomaly?

[ghporter]

It's a good move. It reminds ordinary people that they're vulnerable and that they can hurt others if they don't protect themselves. Sort of sounds like Hygene class in high school, doesn't it?

But it is really a good idea to run a good antivirus package. We're not immune just because we're running Mac OS-there ARE viruses out there that can hurt OS X. Most are originally aimed at Linux machines, but remember that OS X is based on Free BSD (or is it Open BSD? I wonder how many fights I just started ), and that's just another flavor of Linux as far as viruses are concerned.

[Macola]

On the flip side, Norton Antivirus is as bad as a virus itself. If you must install an antivirus package, avoid Norton, or at least disable the autoprotect function. When it was first released for OS X, NAV came with an uninstaller for Autoprotect (maybe it still does)--that tells you something about the product.

[beetone]

Thanks for your response although it is very cryptic. What do you mean by "NAV is worse than a virus itself"? Why disable Autoprotect??
The fact that it comes with an uninstaller (I wish more software did) apparently "tells me something". What?
I have run NAV for a couple of months (with Autoprotect enabled!!) without any problems.
In fairness to Symantec, I think you should be more specific.

Originally posted by Macola:
On the flip side, Norton Antivirus is as bad as a virus itself. If you must install an antivirus package, avoid Norton, or at least disable the autoprotect function. When it was first released for OS X, NAV came with an uninstaller for Autoprotect (maybe it still does)--that tells you something about the product.

[dwishbone]

NAV has been a bit flakey in the past, but I have not had any problems with NAV 9. It works good. The only problem i've had with it was a strange interaction it had with DiskWarrior that caused a kernel panic. that can be avoided though by turning off auto protect before running Disk Warrior.
Norton Utilities (Disk Doctor mainly) you need to avoid like the plague on OS X. it just has never worked right since X came out. DiskWarrior is a much better (and safer) hard drive scan and repair utility.

[Macola]

Originally posted by beetone:
Thanks for your response although it is very cryptic. What do you mean by "NAV is worse than a virus itself"? Why disable Autoprotect??
The fact that it comes with an uninstaller (I wish more software did) apparently "tells me something". What?
I have run NAV for a couple of months (with Autoprotect enabled!!) without any problems.
In fairness to Symantec, I think you should be more specific.

Do a search of this forum and the OS X forum and you'll see what I mean. In my case (this was with 10.1.5, to be fair) I had inexplicable crashes in all MS Office apps, Finder quits, and even a few kernel panics. All of this went away after I got rid of NAV forever. My comment about the uninstaller for Autoprotect meant that they were fully aware that it was buggy, and provided the uninstaller as a band-aid.

Autoprotect was infamous in the days of OS 9 and earlier for causing extension conflicts. I haven't used NAV for over 2 years now, so maybe it's improved. I would never trust it again, though.