{"id":68,"date":"2006-11-28T23:38:04","date_gmt":"2006-11-28T23:38:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=68"},"modified":"2006-11-29T00:29:42","modified_gmt":"2006-11-29T00:29:42","slug":"anti-virus-for-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=68","title":{"rendered":"Anti-virus for free"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been setting up some open-source software on the computers in the SYA<\/a> offices tonight: ClamWin<\/a><\/strong>, an anti-virus scanner for Windows, and Winpooch<\/a><\/strong>, an anti-spyware and anti-trojan scanner (which also hooks into ClamWin to provide real-time anti-virus protection).<\/p>\n

As a project with ECS<\/a>, we had access to their Sophos<\/a> site-licenses. Since we became independent, I have been looking for a replacement. <\/p>\n

It’s still early days, and I’ll have to see how we get on before I can say if I recommend them. But what I’ve read about them has been largely positive, and so far they look like they will fit our needs. And, importantly for a relatively new charity with plenty of other startup costs, they’re free (with no ongoing costs for virus definition updates!)<\/p>\n

You could also argue that being open source makes them more trustworthy. The open-source community is perhaps less susceptible to pressure from adware-pushing companies – like the occasional conspiracy theory stories you hear about anti-spyware software vendors being pressured to turn a blind eye (like Ad-Aware<\/a> or Symantec<\/a>). I’m less concerned about this – but I guess I’m just a trusting type at heart! It’s an interesting point, though.<\/p>\n

If I have one complaint so far, it’s that I think the GUIs could look a little intimidating to a non-geek. They seem fairly straightforward to me – a techie who’s used a number of different anti-virus solutions before – but I wonder how the guys in the office will cope tomorrow. What little user-guide documentation there is really isn’t newbie-friendly. <\/p>\n

So, I’m writing up some notes for the staff so they don’t get too scared tomorrow morning when their PCs start barking at them – yes, winpooch alerts users to a possible violation by barking \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been setting up some open-source software on the computers in the SYA offices tonight: ClamWin, an anti-virus scanner for Windows, and Winpooch, an anti-spyware and anti-trojan scanner (which also hooks into ClamWin to provide real-time anti-virus protection). As a project with ECS, we had access to their Sophos site-licenses. Since we became independent, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}