After having more than my fair share of battles with Panda Antivirus I begin to wonder, is Panda as much of an anti-virus as it is a virus in itself?

I have, over the course of the last 6 months analyzed every application crash, BSOD and alike on the computers at work (20 all in all) and reached the conclusion that 96,8% of all crashes are caused by, yes you guessed it, PAV. No only does it crash the applications, once everything is running, it’s only running on about 75% of the normal speed due to the fact that this little ill-willing bear rummage around in the background and eats system resources. I have even tried to remove it, worked like a charm, except for one thing, it still leaves some files behind, which will contact our main file server, fetch itself and install itself silently in the background, time and time again.

So, in short, here we have a program that will:

• Slow down your computer.
• Prevent you from accessing some files that you actually know are harmless but the Panda doesn’t.
• Crash your applications and even Windows itself forcing you to restart and lose vital data.
• Fetch itself and install itself silently in the background without any involvement from you as end-user.

And how do we notice we have a virus?
Well, mainly it will:

• Slow down your computer.
• Prevent you from accessing some files that you actually know are harmless but the Panda doesn’t.
• Crash your applications and even Windows itself forcing you to restart and lose vital data.
• Fetch itself and install itself silently in the background without any involvement from you as end-user.

See the similarities?

This morning on my way to work I heard that six major ISP:s has struck a deal with the music industry on how to combat the spreading of illegal content on the net (shall we guess that this is only in the music department as of now since the deal was struck with the music industry?). This should be handled in a fashonable manner of sending out cease-and-desist letters and as if that weren’t enough, limiting the web-pirates bandwidth.

It was said in the report that the music industry foresee a loss of the equivalent of $1.6 billion over a 5 year period.

I will not condone the spreading of rights-managed content in any way but the main thing that strikes me in this particular report is the complete cowardness of the british ISP:s.

I made some quick calculations on this, so here we go.

If the brits are as good (or bad) as the swedes (in percent of the population) at downloading music off the net, about 7,5 million brits downloads music illegally. If 10% of these get caught and are sent a letter of cease-and-desist from their ISP, the ISP will send out 750′000 letters and pay a hefty £270′000 (or approx $537′000 US) on postal charges alone, this will make a net loss of £3′240′000 per year in only postal charges. If they then lower the bandwidth of the pirates, they will lose even more in the long-run, because, let’s face it, the need for ultra-high-speed connections for normal households is a market that are purely there to accomodate peoples need for high speeds when downloading, no game, mail or IM will take that amount of bandwidth otherwise.

So if BT has 50% of the market on broadband and the customers all decides to go from the Unlimited type of connection which has 8mbit for £17.99 / month to the more reasonable alternative of “Fast & Reliable” for £7.95 / month, BT will lose a revenue in the vincinity of £32.5 million per month, this will make a nice £390 million per year.

The total cost so far for the ISP:s, seen over the same 5-year period as mentioned by the music industry will be:

£1′966′200′000 (that’s £1.96 Billion). And then we haven’t even begun to take into account the cost for BT employees, Surveillance and monitoring equipment and software, or even the ink and paper that all letters will be printed on.

So, in short. The brittish ISP:s just struck a deal making them lose £300 million more than their business partner (in this case the music industry).

For the average Joe this won’t mean that much, more money to spend on legit files or CD:s, but for the music industry this will be a nice way of making things happen, more people will miss a whole hell of a lot of music that they’ve discovered purely by downloading it and the big record companies can now revert back to focusing on mainstream money-machines that they can sell heaps of copies of to the public, and the public won’t know better than to buy it and think that it is the best thing since sliced bread.

So, how do you really come to terms with this? Move from britain? Shrug a bit and then carry on? I think it’s about time the british people stood up and reclaimed internet as it’s supposed to be, because information wants to be free.