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How are you supposed to get the latest antivirus definitions without an internet connection? The ones on the software CD could be months out of date.

At the tail end of my time at Exeter they were implementing a system whereby if a machine without recognised AV connected it was immediately passed off to locked down section of the internal network which simply held a couple of AV installers that were kept up to date. Thought that was a pretty sensible scheme to me.

Microsoft should have to secure their software properly before they're allowed to comment.

You do realise Microsoft would be taken to court for anticompetitiveness if they fully secured windows? With Vista, it was supposed to be so secure, not even the anti-virus programs could hook into the system - so they complained!

Yes but for macs and linux that would be unfair. I am not so sure about Windows 7 but older Windows variants needed AV but try and get AV for WIn 95 now. Big D mentioned such an idea years ago. In the other forums.

Frankly, you'd have to be insane, yes insane, to connect anything pre-XP to the Internet. AV or no AV, they're riddled with holes that will never be patched.

My Linux PC is currently running Avira for Unix.

I suddenly thought Police Constables weren't allowed on Facebook when they're off ill...

Not really. As a number of people on here have pointed out in times past, it's quite possible for any machine to be passing on viruses via forms such as email without necessarily realising it (and remember how drunk uni students can be at times). TBH I cannot recall what was done with Macs / Linux machines, but certainly all the downloads listed were free to students, so it wasn't as though they were being forced to fork over cash.

A short while after I left, someone did get something onto the Uni networks and it caused a hell of a lot of havoc as they had to shut down significant chunks of the network to stop it propagating, so I can understand them being very twitchy (the above scheme was still in development at this stage).

This is fairly standard practice in fact, especially with wifi networks. At our place if you're on the wifi if your system doesn't appear to be secure all web traffic gets redirected to a site where you can download necessary security software. Plus you can only access 'known safe' services unless you're also using the VPN.

There's actually talk at our place of not letting PCs on the LAN at all unless they're using one of the approved 'images' i.e. a known secure config that can be re-imaged to the PC pretty much at every boot up.

You really can't be too careful with this stuff any more. Not only is there the constant issue of viruses, malware etc there's the issue of confidential data security. if you breach the regs the wrong way, both you and the company you work for can be in serious trouble.

+1

Is that a cheeky dig or a genuine mistake from the Beeb?