Given that ClamXav is no longer free, I figure I might as well look into the other options before purchasing it.
Anyway, the latest review from AV Comparatives (conducted in July of 2014) suggested that the best free options (in terms of protection) are Avast, Avira and Sophos.
Does anybody have any experience with / opinions on any of these options? From the user reviews I've been able to find, people seem to speak better of Avira and Saphos than they do Avast, but it's a pretty small sample size.
There really doesn't seem to be anything particularly special or unique about ClamXav (relative to the other free solutions). It's kind of funny how it became so much more popular than the other solutions.
WARNING! WARNING!! INCOMING HUGE WALL OF TEXT!!!
Please, don't yell at me if you hate long posts. Be kind and just scroll on by please. And yes, I do have too much time on my hands but in my defense, I am permanently disabled and live alone (poor me!) so sometimes I do go a little overboard with my posts. If it helps, I do mean well!
While I don't have high hopes, it costs zero and might help so since I find it does not adversely affect system performance nor irritate me with pop ups, I've been using Avira's free app. It's been trouble free so there's that.
It has also discovered zero. It has intercepted zero.
That isn't necessarily bad. I practice safe habits surfing. I never open files from untrusted sources. I run Ghostery to turn off tracking on everything it covers and not just the defaults - everything. I enable stuff rarely on a case by case basis if some page needs it and I approve of it. This does not come up often. Ghostery is free also. They make money selling data, if you let them use yours anonymously as part of a large aggregate. I enabled this because they offer me something of value and I am fine with them selling anonymous data to the marketeers so they can continue to in exchange give me this. I respect that might be a turn off for some but it doesn't phase me personally.
I tried Disconnect Desktop which connects you to the net via a VPN they provide and also blocks a lot of tracking by default. There is some issue with that that prevents the Steam gaming client from connecting. It is easy enough to shut it off and turn it back on after gaming but ultimately it seemed redundant to me. Ghostery is blocking more tracking for me and I don't need or even want to connect via VPN. If you do though, this is a good option and is free. Even the fully featured pay version is actually free because they are some type of sort of not for profit or whatnot. I forget the name of it. Sorry, I was not a business major. ;-)
I deleted the clam. As somebody else noted above, what it does is pretty old and out of date news at this point.
Other stuff I use are browser add-ons for Safari in my case. I run Adblock which does a nice job and does not bug me with pop ups, etc. I can selectively enable an ad I want for some reason easily enough. I also use clea.nr Videos which reduces You Tube pages to just the video itself. Lovely. I can always see the other stuff if I am feeling masochistic for some reason. I do leave showing my subscriptions enabled. I use Facebook cleaner too but honestly, Facebook is so dirty no amount of soap can ever get it clean. I am only there to communicate with family and a select few friends who are real, live people I actually know in "real life." Even then, I really hate the place. Apple needs to create something for families that is like Facebook with none of the Facebook. I know we have photo sharing, messages, etc. but a stripped down Family Connect app of some sort by Apple and included in OS X and iOS would be really cool. Well, this assumes you really want to be connected to family that way. Come to think of it, I love them but some distance is probably a healthy thing.
Sorry, I am really wandering off there but just one more thing I do that I'll mention. I do not search with google. I do not use google anything anymore. They are data pimps whoring me out. Well, I shall prostitute myself for crappy apps no more with the single exception of You Tube where tracking is turned off (sorry google!) and the UI is reduced to the video itself. I don't use Yahoo search either and I sure don't use Bing. God, Microsoft cannot even come up with a decent name can they, never mind decent software? Microsoft is not welcome in my home or office. What does this leave? DuckDuckGo, that's what and unlike with lesser browsers you don't need to go looking for a plug in or even their page to enable it. That said, I did bother to visit the main page one time and make it my home page. Why this choice? Many probably know by now but for anyone who may not, they do not track your search history. That's why.
Why do I care about tracking? Because it is so pervasive and provides so much data to marketeers that it can even impact what you pay for something online versus what somebody else pays. Don't believe me? Do you wonder why it is that when you visit someplace like Amazon.com the prices are changing constantly and I do mean constantly for many things. Look at music for example. Search up some favorite artist albums and wish list them. Now, watch how they change in price regularly but especially note what the prices are. Notice anything odd there? Since when is one album $5.99 and the same one on some other day is $5.07 just as an example. Since when do retailers ever go with anything but x dollars and 99 or maybe 95 cents because research has taught them doing this causes buyers to perceive the price as being a step lower. So 9.99 looks so much better than 10 bucks to us in our subconscious minds. Now, when we deliberately think about this we know that of course it's bs. However, when we are shopping we are not making that analysis with each purchase. The grocery is a great example of this. We might go in there and buy maybe 50 or more items all x.99 and never give it a thought. Marketers know however that if everything was x.00 we would probably buy less or make alternative choices.
I got into all that stuff because there is a reason companies spend so much money to harvest user data online about lifestyle, demographic, purchase and other information and get paid very well for that data which we give them in the majority for free. They are doing this with exactly one thought in mind - to extract the maximum amount of money possible from consumers. What the market will bear, which is what stuff needs to be priced at to move, varies all the way down to the individual and this is why they want this data for one reason. More significant however is that it is already in use and affecting the prices we pay for things. I believe without having bother to conduct any real research into this to prove the point that it stands to reason that I am seeing prices that are all over the place and have broken from the established .99 norm because this data is being fed into algorithms that spit out what I would pay versus you for, "The Beatles 20th Hits Album." Ultimately, this is not especially fair and is prone to error. For example they could mistakenly come to believe i am better off than I am because I happened to have bought an iMac on Amazon. They cannot know that it was an early pension disbursement that made that possible. So no, I am not in a good position to pay 10.27 for somebody's hits while somebody else who actually is out there earning more than I get may see a price of say, 9.42 for the very same music.
Something I need to do in fairness to validate some of my assumptions beyond the reading I've done on this subject is to try it out right here at home. I haven't felt like bothering but I could create a new Amazon account with a different email and not furnish any payment information initially. I could then create test wish lists in both accounts. Without turning tracking back on here, that might be enough to just test the waters and see if prices differ or not. I know this is about as basic as it gets and to call it research is a real stretch but still, it would be at least a little telling. I wonder too if sans tracking data I might see all default x.99 prices at first too. To try to control this the email account would need to be a dummy one somewhere I don't even have one at all. Outlook.com would work nicely here.
Anyway, sorry I went on so long but that is my own approach and I've never been infected with anything since the PC-XT although that also goes back to BBS systems pre-web. Obviously, the approach and software evolved over time. Even running the high priority target Windows I never had a problem.
It's worth remembering that end users are not for the most part targets of the really nasty hacks out there. It is point of sale systems, banking systems, governmental data around the world, corporate trade secrets, credit card info, etc. In the grand scheme of hacking and malware we are small potatoes.
Try Avira I would say. It's free. It might help. It doesn't impact performance. That said, safe habits will get you a lot further and nothing but nothing will protect you better than redundant backups locally with really important data residing in the cloud as well. In this way, a nuke can drop on your house and as long as you are far away when it happens, you will at least still have your data.
