The Good

http://www.activevirusshield.com/

AOL is giving away free Anti Virus software powered by Kaspersky. It's called Active Virus Shield. There are already some free offerings, but more cannot be a bad thing and over the years I've personally grown to like the speed and quality of signature releases of Kaspersky, so I'm happy to see a free offering using this.

The Bad

Well, you have seen it move from blogs to more mainstream media by now, but AOL leaked some search logs.

Interesting to note that many people seem to be outraged by such a leak and feel their privacy violated, yet those same people don't bother/ask to encrypt the connection to search engines. Somehow there seems a lack of balance to me.
Worse, once you searched for something and click on the search results, the referer header will reveal the search terms you used to the website you are heading to.

The Ugly

AOL also announced a few days ago another free service. They intend to offer free storage of 5Gbyte. The warez dudes will love this: more than a DVD full of illegal copies. I'm happy to say I'm not the one who'll have to play "whack-a-mole" on this project. I do hope they build in loads of measures to prevent this before they go public with this.

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Swa Frantzen -- Section 66