AVID: The Allchin Stumble

In this posting, I suppose AVID should be taken to stand for AntiVirus In Dismay—in dismay at the pronouncements of Microsoft’s Jim Allchin. First of all, Jim Allchin appeared to claim that Vista didn’t need Antivirus software. He actually said (in a telephone conference) that he would be comfortable with his seven year-old son using a Vista machine without any antivirus software installed. So stories flashed around the web suggesting that there was no need for AV on Vista.

There must have been heart attacks in AV vendor boardrooms everywhere—the truth being that it’s only Windows that has vulnerability to viruses. There’s no big market in selling AV on the Mac or Linux. If Vista is even close to virus-proof than the AV vendors can close up shop.

Now it may be that someone in Microsoft bent Allchin’s ear and pointed out that Microsoft itself was in the Vista AV market or it may be that Jim himself never meant to say what he appeared to say. Er.. So, “he would be comfortable with his seven year-old son using a Vista machine without any antivirus software”, why? Because, he’s always wanted to see how a 7 year old responds to getting a virus infection? Anyway, lo and behold, the web is suddenly awash with stories about how Allchin believes that AV is indeed necessary for Vista (but only if you don’t happen to be his 7 year old son).

He also used his blog in an attempt to de-gaff the situation, writing: “After reading the transcript, I could certainly see that what I said wasn’t as clear as it could have been, and I’m sorry for that. However, it is also clear from the transcript that I didn’t say that users shouldn’t run anti-virus software with Windows Vista! In fact, later in the call, I explicitly made this point again, because I had realised I wasn’t as clear as I should have been.” So are you clear now?

The sad truth is that AV software is ineffective anyway, so this is all a non-story. The only effective way to prevent malware from infecting computers is to run the authentication-based software from companies such as Savant Security, AppSense, SecureWave and Bit9. These products do the job, and they’ll do it for all kinds of malware and the technical approach they take would be effective on any computer and they would work for Jim Allchin’s 7 year old son too.

AntiVirus’ Ineffectiveness Described is this week’s meaning for the AVID acronym. I’ve written a white paper, funded by one of the AVID heroes, Bit9, which tells the story of the abject failure of AntiVirus software. It documents everything that came to mind as I was writing it, including just about everything that I have posted on this blog. The white paper ends by describing the Bit9 solution to malware, giving you a detailed technical picture of how malware can be stopped without paying any money at all to the AV companies which are, as you may have gathered, incapable of protecting you effectively.

You can get a copy of the paper by going to the Bit9 web site (www.bit9.com) or by downloading it here (see link top right of this post). If you are in the position of understanding the ineffectiveness of AV software and you need ammunition to convince management that there is another more effective and far less expensive way to deal with the problem, this paper is for you. It was written for you.

However, it is not the last word and this is not, by any means, the last AVID posting. I have resolved to help cure the IT industry of the virus pestilence and I will not stop writing about the fact that it has been using the wrong technical approach to stop malware for the best part of two decades—not until the technology that will stop the problem is installed in most IT sites and on most home computers.

Such technology comes from these companies; SecureWave, AppSense, Bit9 and Savant Protection. There are four such companies at the moment, although a fifth has just come on to my radar. I’ll have to investigate it before I include it in my list of effective Anti-Malware companies.

The drum beat is getting louder.

Television is a tough business. It didn’t use to be. There used to be a controlled market with a limited number of channels. Then came satellite and cable and the channels grew dramatically. Now the Internet is making its entry with a whole new video distribution capability, courtesy of YouTube and other video posting sites.

Technically, the cost of making video has been collapsing for years. I remember being told, sometime around 1990, that you couldn’t shoot a video for less than $2000 per hour. Now camcorders are ubiquitous and the current/next generation of mobile phones can shoot video. If you don’t cost your own time, shooting video is hobby-cheap or cheaper.

The collapse in cost wouldn’t have meant much if there had been no way of distributing the output, but YouTube took care of that. The recent US elections were the first YouTube elections. The Republican defeat was influenced by YouTube. Politicians in the US (of all persuasions) are fast to take advantage of technology. The defeat of Senator Paul Allen (Republican), by a small margin, in the race that finally gave the US Senate to the Democrats, had a lot to do with this YouTube video clip, where Paul Allen uses the term/name “macaca” to refer to a cameraman (who was US born but of Asian Indian decent). It lost him a lot of votes and his ten point lead in the polls vanished.

It wasn’t the only political video on YouTube by any means. In fact there were many, as politicians of both sides in different Senate and Congress races posted adverts onto this free broadcast medium—in attempts either to discredit their opponents or promote themselves. Naturally, only a few of these videos attracted large audiences.

So why is it world changing?

It is world changing because suddenly there’s an uncontrolled market in video. Everyone’s a broadcaster if they want to be and a large number of people are going to the web for video content as well as television.

An interesting example of this is provided by the video entitled “Colbert Roasts President Bush—2006 White House Correspondents Dinner” which is available to view on Google.

When Stephen Colbert, the guest entertainer at this dinner, actually gave the speech which the video records, it was widely reported in the press the following day as “disappointing”, “a poor performance” etc. There was a good reason for that. Among the people Colbert was making fun of were the press. However, the posting of the video on the Internet supports a quite different opinion—that his performance was both incredibly funny, and very brave—given that President Bush, whom he was making fun of most, was seated a few seats away.

This video has been viewed almost 3 million times on the web, and may be the most popular video ever posted to the web. (To understand some of the humour you need to be a regular watcher of the satirical Colbert Report, in which Colbert pretends to be a Right Wing Opinion Maker like Bill O’Reilly of Fox).

The New York Times headline was that announced the acquisition was GooTube, which made me laugh. The rumour of a Google swoop for YouTube emerged on Friday and by the end of Monday it was a done deal. Google was not the first “giant with a pile of cash” to go after YouTube. Yahoo!, News Corp, Viacom and Microsoft had already knocked on the door, only to be told that YouTube didn’t want to be acquired and didn’t need to be acquired.

Maybe it was the natural charm of Smitty (Google’s CEO) that made the difference—plus a promise of non-interference and persistence for the YouTube brand. Google’s shares actually rose on rumours of $1.6 billion bid so there are some investors out there that believe YouTube is worth that kind of money. Here’s what I think they’re thinking: “Google will easily be able to monetize YouTube and 100 million video views per day will soon become millions of video advert views per day.”

Dream on, is what I’m thinking. There’s a commercial war developing out there between the “people will buy video” camp (represented by Apple and most movie companies) and “people will watch adverts rather than pay” (backed by TV companies—most of which are owned by movie companies). If that sounds a little schizoid, don’t worry, just think of it as a civil war.

Under normal circumstances, I’d back the video adverts to win in the mass market. But now I’m not so sure—because software that skips the ads will inevitably appear, just as software which undermines DRM will appear. The truth is that most people resent adverts and fast-forward them out of existence, if they can. However, people are happy to watch infomercials if they are well produced. So in theory the future should consist of adverts we want to watch.

I believe that Google will have its work cut out to build a revenue stream that justifies the purchase price of YouTube, but I also think that it doesn’t really matter too much, because the consequence of Google not buying YouTube would have been that someone else did—and Google would have remained third in the video game (behind YouTube and MySpace). Google cannot afford to be third.

YouTube also brings something to the party that Google needs. Despite being web-savvy in many ways, Google is not social-network savvy. YouTube beat everyone else to the punch, because it based its video business on a very effective social network of recommendations. Google can learn from that. Google’s rise in the past few years may have been impressive, but it isn’t the “next Microsoft” yet.