Sunday, March 11, 2007

Don't Let OneCare Eat Your Email - AppScout Whenever a program gets wide distribution there are bound to be some users who, rightly or wrongly, feel it has caused them pain. Sometimes it's a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for "the hog was here, so the hog did it"). Other times there really is a problem, perhaps due to an unusual configuration or a compatibility problem with some less-common applications. But it's rare that the problem is as serious and the response as limited as in this case. A reader brought to my attention a thread in Microsoft's discussion forums for Windows OneCare titled "Outlook and Outlook Express Mail Store Missing or Quarantined". The thread started with a message in January and it's still running today, with no clear resolution. In brief, if you get a virus in an email message received by Outlook, OneCare's next virus sweep may quarantine or delete your entire email store. If you receive a virus via Outlook Express OneCare may quarantine or delete the entire folder containing the virus. Really! As the thread goes on, more and more users weigh in reporting the problem. Moderators attempt soothing responses like "Obviously, the action by OneCare is undesirable. However, you can ... exclude the Outlook PST file" and "I know it won't make you feel any better, but you're all really helping to make OneCare a better program for everyone" and "You never want email scanned on the way in or out of the system as it causes more problems than it fixes." At one or two points the moderators announce a fix, but the problem reports keep coming in. One moderator mused that this had been a problem in the beta of OneCare 1.0, but he hadn't seen it since then. Another suggested that version 1.5 may have been coded from the wrong "code branch" of the base 1.0/1.1 version. Hmm.... 3:08:23 PM

Windows Live OneCare Can Eat Your Email. Windows Live OneCare Can Eat Your Email. FutureDomain writes in to point us to a blog sponsored by PC Magazine, reporting about another problem with Windows Live OneCare. Apparently, it sometimes deletes the entire Outlook or Outlook Express .PST mailbox when it finds a virus in one of the messages. The only solution is to tell OneCare to exclude the entire Outlook mailbox. This is the software that came in last in antivirus tests. The trail of tears is ongoing over on the Microsoft forums. [Slashdot] 3:04:30 PM

Chertoff Defends New Computer Project A new Homeland Security program aims to analyze existing, legally collected computer data, not gather new personal information on U.S. citizens, Secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday in defending the program from congressional critics. The project, still in pilot stage, will help investigators understand evidence gathered through subpoenas but won't troll computers for new, private information, Chertoff said in an interview with The Associated Press. 'It's an experiment to see how you can better analyze data that you already have, that you've already legally collected, to see if you can understand it, sort it and make use of it more readily than simply doing it manually,' Chertoff said. Called ADVISE _ for Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement _ the program can be used to find 'relationships or patterns' from information including financial and telephone records, he said. 1:18:50 PM

© Copyright 2007 Paul Hardwick. Last update: 3/18/07; 11:13:48 PM.