Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

It’s fitting that the most popular antivirus software is named Norton, because it truly lives up to the reputation of its Honeymooners namesake. Ed Norton purports to be your best friend. He bursts through your door, unbidden and just barely tolerated, and sets up shop in your kitchen. His crazy schemes start with the best intentions but end in chaos and disaster. Despite all this, you feel like you have to love him.

I don’t think I really need to waste time elaborating on the relationship between Microsoft and viruses, but antivirus software is sometimes just as bad as the viruses it seeks to destroy. It hinders productivity with intrusive reminders, scans every piece of mail that you send or receive, and oh yes, slows down your computer (scroll down to the chart).

There’s no escaping antivirus software and its culture of fear. It comes bundled on every new system, designed to deactivate after a few months and make you pay for your continued safety. Think you can avoid the protection racket when the time comes? If your antivirus software shuts itself off and you don’t feel like paying, Windows rolls up its sleeves and starts breaking your kneecaps with its own security warnings. Sometimes it can be even worse, like when BU instituted a new computer security policy in the summer of 2003. Thousands of students returned to campus and plugged in their computers, only to find their systems hijacked by a an hour long remote scan that then installed McAfee. Remember the Sasser worm? BU took drastic measures to rid itself of the problem. The university decided to perform remote virus scans on every computer on campus. The sudden surge in traffic crippled the university’s entire network for a day.

I’ve always been very competent with my computer, and I’m not the kind of idiot who opens strange e-mail attachments from unknown senders. Still, I use BitTorrent quite a bit, and one never knows when a malicious, self-propagating worm may strike, so a little over a year ago I ponied up the cash for Norton Antivirus. It was no big deal, really, and sure enough, I remained virus free.

When my subscription expired and Norton began to remind me on a daily basis that I needed to renew, I just kept ignoring it. It felt exactly like hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock. Two months of snoozing later, I uninstalled Norton entirely and decided to check my system with AVG Free. No viruses, no spyware, no nothing. My system is pristine, and all without antivirus software of any kind. I’m keeping AVG on my computer for now, since it costs me nothing and it’s the most resource efficient antivirus program, but I very much doubt that I’ll have it around in the long term.

Somewhere along the line I forgot that computer health is a lot like regular health. As long as you’re being a reasonable person and not doing stupid, risky things, there’s no reason to dose yourself with antibiotics every day.