"No Victoria, the Second Life Patcher isn't a Trojan"

I just want to alert the devs, again, that the naming conventions they chose for Second Life patches (as well as its presence in the Windows "Temp" folder) trigger antivirus and antispyware applications to flag them potential threats.


Today's fun episode with Sunbelt's CounterSpy:


Now, I know I've read something like this happening before. I just wanted to offer a post-mortem take that the Second Life patcher is being flagged as some really nefarious stuff that it frankly isn't, and that might scare people away.


Possible solution to the problem: Name the patches something more pithy. Numerical EXE files are virus scan fodder when it comes to false positives.

In the meantime, I've alerted Sunbelt of the problem and they should hopefully add this as a "safe" MD5sum.

most anti virus (what that means is panic every time your IP address is accessed) register anything with atuo update protocalls as a tro... anti V software is mostly a joke, windows will detect serious ones that norton and mc affie wont see/ remove,

I fully wipe my ass on the ppl who charge 100+us$ who claim protection, especially when i get a problem they cant fix it, but their free download will.

Im looking at you MCAffie, 120$ per licence just to dl freeware to remove the issue, you used to be cool ... now your just a greedy lamer

if your a noobie to computers dont buy antivirus software, mcaffie offers free cleaners and norton offers a free webscan... why pay for it

you might as well pay for porus plasic sheeting and DuctTape to seal your paper walls against bio-threats

Heh... heh.

Anyway, to reiterate - the problem here seems to be the naming convention and presence in the Temp folder (a common hideout for standard viral processes) - since the MD5s don't seem to match.


Most scanner programs worth their salt these days just do an MD5 Hash check, filename check, location check, maybe a few bytecode line reads if they're really deep stuff... nothing I would pay premium for.

Given Sunbelt is located just upstate and is a smaller shop, I consider it supporting a local business over the big boys.


Edit: And I would never suggest going without antivirus of some sort. Even if they're not always helpful, AVG Free and ZoneAlarm (or Kerio Free Firewall, now under new management) are good bets -- especially for the little things that compromise a system, like NetBios.

just for fun MD5's in ntfs wont match MD5's (if there is such a thing) in unix systems, such as mac os, which the lindens seem to be catering to (quicktime videos omg why dont you ask for something expensive like poser? oops) becuase if you support mac os you have to suuport the 3 programs that run on it.

depends, ive ran many years without zone alarm virus or spyware scanners, they only seem to half work anyways, altho i dont see the popups i see the performance degrade ... format and reinstall most computers come with a restore disk

and its a personall grudge why am i gonna waste 25% of my power and slow my hard disk down 100% of the time for the 1 out of 1000 chance that site 3100284 has a issue

Afternoon Osgeld,

ZA does not appreciably (sp?) slow down my system, and its only slightly 'above average' (about 3-4 generations back now).

As for a virus scanner slowing down your system - who says you have to have the realtime daemon running? With Norton for example, you can have it update the virus listings daily and run a full scan weekly (or otherwise on demand) when you're going to be eating or some such. No need for the daemon then.

Then again, I have very strict (work-level) firewall protocols in place, including a small business hardware firewall as an adjunct to ZA on every desktop and notebook. And Adblock plugin for FireFox. So YYMV. But you can still use virus software while not killing your PC.

Anyway, back on topic: Yes, I'm also tired of the updater getting changed, in particular since every update has ZA popping up with 'can we let this (unknown name) app access the internet please?' messages. Gah.

At minimum, please name the updater to something understandable by the general public.

This virus talk is out of my league, but I have to point our that you don't seem to know anything about Macs (or streaming media formats). Also, the implication that SL is "catering" to Macs is so far out as to be laughable. The exact opposite is true.

And worse, there's no antivirus software for Mac OS that's worth anything because there's no active viruses in the wild to watch for! And no ActiveX so your browser won't automatically download and run spyware! What a rip!