Live data from Hacker News

Symantec throws up hurdles to independent software developers

codeandweb.com

41–45 of 45 posts

Re: Symantec throws up hurdles to independent software developers

#41
Software that does this should become illegal. This is technical slander.

They are not even trying to explain what this means, the reason for this is simple: they want to show off, how many times they "protected" their customers, so that they are fooled to believe that AV products actually have value in them.

Re: Symantec throws up hurdles to independent software developers

#42
post #14

I worked at Symantec on the reputation team, tools I worked on directly generated the reputation behind the WS.Reputation.1 message. First: file a false positive report at https://submit.symantec.com/false_positive/ . (Options: "When downloading a file", "Norton Internet Security 2012 or Norton AntiVirus 2012", "Download Insight") This goes directly to the team and they should have your programs whitelisted within a…

How can a developer check his or her applications against this without needing to run Norton Internet Security or AV. If this isn't possible, is there a cheap(er) option that I can get my hands on that still includes this reputation check?

Afraid not, which is pretty annoying. There are free trial versions, if you are willing to install NIS or 360.

Re: Symantec throws up hurdles to independent software developers

#43

Norton has caused a large amount of frustration for our GitHub for Windows users - Symantec will basically block any EXE using MSys, because of its use of the CreateRemoteThread API. There is no way I am going to submit all of the 200+ EXEs that comprise MSysGit to that web form, though we will try signing all of the EXEs.

Argh, that's rough, submit a few mention there are more, the team will be able to vet the entire collection.

Re: Symantec throws up hurdles to independent software developers

#44
post #14

I worked at Symantec on the reputation team, tools I worked on directly generated the reputation behind the WS.Reputation.1 message. First: file a false positive report at https://submit.symantec.com/false_positive/ . (Options: "When downloading a file", "Norton Internet Security 2012 or Norton AntiVirus 2012", "Download Insight") This goes directly to the team and they should have your programs whitelisted within a…

Just to be clear, Mozilla has always signed beta builds, which were never a problem as far as I recall (I do a lot of outreach for Mozilla). We did get false positive complaints from nightly users who also used Symantec software, and we now sign nightlies, in part because of the reputation cred given to valid, signed binaries.

All releases and betas are signed with the Mozilla Corp. cert, there's a separate cert for nightly and Aurora builds, and a third cert for dev builds. I agree that we did have false positives with nightlies in the past, but I don't think that's happened for a while. If I'm mistaken, it'd be great to hear about them (I'll ping my contacts there, as well).

Re: Symantec throws up hurdles to independent software developers

#45
post #25
post #14

I worked at Symantec on the reputation team, tools I worked on directly generated the reputation behind the WS.Reputation.1 message. First: file a false positive report at https://submit.symantec.com/false_positive/ . (Options: "When downloading a file", "Norton Internet Security 2012 or Norton AntiVirus 2012", "Download Insight") This goes directly to the team and they should have your programs whitelisted within a…

Your steps sound nice but in reality it doesn't work out this way (speaking from multiple experiences with your reputation system). First of all, EVERY piece of desktop software my company delivers to users is signed via a known and trusted authority. We knew that would be important and took steps before ever releasing our first piece of desktop software. Secondly, the error message that users are presented with SCAR…

We are having the very same experience. We signed our software with a code signing cert from a reputable issuer (DigiCert). We discovered that Norton 360 was automatically quarantining the downloaded installer and most users had no idea how retrieve it from quarantine. We got whitelisted and then released a bug-fix update and voila the our app started getting quarantined again. We are losing potential users and it have been damaging to our company!
Post reply on HN