AVG Backs down from "Flooding the internet"

[LazyLion]

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/07/06/0522221.shtml

Simon Wright writes "As a website that is featured heavily in many Google Australia search results, Whirlpool (Australia's largest technology forum) has been particularly affected by AVG's LinkScanner. We've seen a traffic increase as much as 12 hits per second from these bots. So we've actively and loudly campaigned against this move by AVG, encouraging all users of AVG 8.0 to uninstall the product. The discussion starts here. And AVG's backing down is posted here." From that URL:"'As promised, I am letting you know that the latest update for AVG Free edition has addressed and rectified the issue that [Whirlpool] have brought to our attention. This update has now been released to users and has also been built into the latest installation package for AVG Free.' — Peter Cameron, Managing Director, AVG Australia."

Thanks AVG, but BitDefender seems to be working very nicely for me now. Too bad our 8 year relationship had to come to an end over this. Maybe next time you will seriously weigh up the consequences of your actions?

 

[The_Unbeliever]

Their intention was to make the Internet a bit more safer, but it backfired.

 

[HavocXphere]

Their intention was to make the Internet a bit more safer, but it backfired.

Backfired is not quite the right word for something that DDoS'd a bunch of sites by accident. More like major fark-up.

 

[PeterCH]

Who wasted a lot of their cap because of AVG, around here?

 

[PeterCH]

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/07/06/0522221.shtml



Thanks AVG, but BitDefender seems to be working very nicely for me now. Too bad our 8 year relationship had to come to an end over this. Maybe next time you will seriously weigh up the consequences of your actions?

Disable the BD Antiphishing plugin.... though

 

[LancelotSA]

OK someone explain to me how I as an internet surfer get affected by this if I have AVG?

 

[LancelotSA]

Disable the BD Antiphishing plugin.... though

...and why not just turn off the AVG link scanner if it is a problem?

 

[PeterCH]

OK someone explain to me how I as an internet surfer get affected by this if I have AVG?

If u have the plugin running it will prefetch all the links on every page you view. That will affect your bandwidth but also will make you download
dodgy links. So if you google for something, and a possible child pron link appears on the results list, you've visited it.
Your cap will also feel the txt downloads.

 

[LancelotSA]

If u have the plugin running it will prefetch all the links on every page you view. That will affect your bandwidth but also will make you download
dodgy links. So if you google for something, and a possible child pron link appears on the results list, you've visited it.
Your cap will also feel the txt downloads.

May I ask for a little more of an explanation? It obviously does not fetch the whole page as when I click on a link it still takes a while to load the page, so what does it prefetch? Just all the text on the page? Or what?

 

[kiepie]

...and why not just turn off the AVG link scanner if it is a problem?

Last time I had a look at AVG 8 and turned something off, it gave me a nasty error alert/sign down in my taskbar/clock area.

 

[Gunny]

Last time I had a look at AVG 8 and turned something off, it gave me a nasty error alert/sign down in my taskbar/clock area.

There is an option to ignore module state

 

[PeterCH]

May I ask for a little more of an explanation? It obviously does not fetch the whole page as when I click on a link it still takes a while to load the page, so what does it prefetch? Just all the text on the page? Or what?

Someone explains it in the comments:
http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/07/03/1411254.shtml?tid=172

Read through the comments on the first discussion, there are two discussions on
Slashdot. CmdrTaco posted the first warnings way before the Aussies.

I quote Taco:

"Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding websites with meaningless traffic (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now). Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by websites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots. "

The second discussion is here:
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/07/06/0522221.shtml

The program downloads the links, each one to verify its not loaded with
malware. It doesn't download images but does do text and it does
exchange cookies according to the Slashdot. It spoofs the IE 6 UA
string, but there is a way to avoid it by checking for something specific.

So yes, it will waste your cap by downloading every link you see (and invisible ones) such as links leading to offsite porn sites, even dodgy ones.
It won't speed up your browsing as its not keeping the data for
your browser to download off your local harddisk or memory.

In my personal opinion, it is a SLIMY tactic as mentioned by CmdrTaco above.

And why is this bad for us in SA? Well we get small CAPS.
It sucks for webmasters because the worm downloads sites repeatedly, unlike
Googlebot which follows ROBOTS.txt file and which co-ordinates the sites it's
spiders (so it spiders a site only daily), every user of this AVG feature downloads
the same sites he/she may see (there is no central co-ordination).

 

[MeNeZ]

Looks like AVG is gonna stop its link scanner thing... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/07/avg_stems_fake_traffic/

After howls of protest from countless web masters, AVG has promised to quit spewing fake traffic across the internet.

 

[LazyLion]

Looks like AVG is gonna stop its link scanner thing... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/07/avg_stems_fake_traffic/

um, that's what this thread is about!

but thanks for the link!

 

[.geek]

AVG8 works fine for me. I just disabled the add-on in FF3.

My bandwidth usage has been no higher since using AVG8.

 

[Kokop]

AVG 8 sux.

It has decided my new site has malicious content LS/Downloader.

It has taken me a week to try and get this resolved. Not happy.

Anyone else notice it seems to slow down browsing and causing browsers to crash??

Bad release this one.

 

[PeterCH]

Use AVAST!.

 

[The_Unbeliever]

Feeling I get is that all the AV companies will start to release wonky products...

 

[mZbZ]

Use Avira its good

 

[LancelotSA]

Well I hear the arguments about the nasty warning in the system tray when switching off link scanner in AVG console but I have disabled the addon on Firefox and it seems to no longer be pre fetching for me. If that is the case I cannot see that it is a big deal really...