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November 7, 2005
Windows Live - The Goodies
I'm probably not the only one to state that the Windows Live service is barely half-baked and it was released way too soon. Not only technically incomplete (still no Firefox support), sometimes it doesn't even work with Internet Explorer! Could this be a sign that Microsoft is really that desperate to catch up with Google?
Anyway, despite the incompleteness, there are however some very interesting goodies in the Windows Live portal. One of them is the Windows Live Safety Center. This includes a free ActiveX-based antivirus scanner, based on the RAV (or OneCare) engine.
You may wish to check the type of information collected by Microsoft beforehand:
http://safety.live.com/site/en-us/article/datacollect.htm
Some examples include: Hosts (the Windows hosts file?), the contents of the Startup Folder, the list of installed Services and Drivers, the list of Internet Explorer Add-ins, the contents of the Registry Run key, and so on.
Of course, due to the usage of ActiveX technology, the scanner is limited to the Windows platform. A good thing is that unlike OneCare, it also works on Windows 2000 as well as 9x'es. By the way, the other extreme is probably Trend Micro's online scanner, which even works (tested) under MacOS - neat!
And last but not least, we (Kaspersky) have our own Online Scanner, which has been developed from scratch in Bucharest, at KL Romania. You may find it at:
http://www.kaspersky.com/downloads/kws/
or the newly-released Romanian version:
Posted by Costin Raiu at November 7, 2005 2:46 PM