Spybot Immunize Plus IE 8 Final Equals Disaster On WinXP SP3

[bitman]

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"For example, SmartScreen Filter uses a list which is hosted by Microsoft, to which any IE 8 user can contribute and which is thus much more quickly responsive than a local list downloaded weekly."

Explain to me how having to fetch a list from MS is more efficient than a local list (minus the fetching) unless the data is stored in and processed in a more efficient way. MS has never been faster or safer at protecting individuals than people who find the exploits and report them and often provided a fix before hand and reporting them as a courtesy for MS to fix it in a more maintream method.

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But right now, it has been EXTREMELY effective for me, this IE8 bug is just really really really annoying. was working fine in IE7, make it work in IE8, by theory yes its a bad idea, however, it shouldn't have crossed the critical line in this short period of time from perfectly fine i IE7 to completely broken in IE8.

There are several reasons an Internet accessed list can be more effective, assuming the system providing the responses to queries has enough bandwidth available to support the requests.

First, changes to the status of a site become available as soon as they are added to the Internet attached system, rather than waiting up to a week after they are detected with Spybot S&D's weekly updates. Second, downloading and searching a list of thousands of web sites locally is inherently inefficient, since it's unilikely anyone will ever access more than a handful of these sites in the lifetime of their PC, let alone a short time period. Third, the filtering can be done with much more granularity, down to a specific page or even file, which also implies the potential for hundreds of thousands to millions of entries in the database which obviously can't be supported locally on each PC.

Also, since the previous design that SmartScreen Filter is based upon itself used a smaller cached list of commonly accessed 'bad' sites, I'd assume it does the same. Since this list was downloaded only when it changed, which may have been weekly to monthly, it only contained a small number of well known bad sites that didn't change very often, which is what PepiMK stated they generally use Immunize for anyway.

So in general, SmartScreen Filter has all of the positives of Immunization and more with virtually none of the negatives. I personally make my security choices based on logical examination of the abilities, not historical determinations of what has worked in the past. This is important since significant changes in the design of either the OS or something like Internet Explorer can have major effects on the ability or even need for some of the older security programs to provide protection. Ignoring these changes simply leaves the protection in an out of date status and may actually reduce the true security overall, exactly the point everyone else believes they're trying to make here.

Bitman