Karsten Bräckelmann wrote: > On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 07:28 -0700, John Rudd wrote: >> (to the developers, not in answer to Burnie) >> >> See, the current name scheme needs to be fixed. And no one responded at >> all to my proposed scheme from a month or two ago. > > Coincidentally, my very first question on this list years ago was about > naming conventions (or the lack thereof), too. :) > > karsten > >
That probably means names are really not all that important in the big picture. Some time ago there was an effort in the AV industry to come to agreement on names. Think about that. One of the advantages of the early solutions to new outbreaks is providing the name of the virus. The discoverer gets to wave it around in their promos and adverts and it is accepted as an example of competence. Nobody is going to give up that gift. ClamAV has been first many times and because there were no names available they made them up. That didn't set well with the commercial side of the business so they all came up with their own names. The press dotes on the commercial houses because of the advertising dollars they represent and so naturally they're going to use them as resources when describing viruses. You cannot do anything to change this in a free market. There are much more important things to be concerned with than what a virus is called. The only metric worth getting your shorts in a bunch over is how much malware is getting past your firewall. For that you need to have people focused on patterns, not fluff like virus names. When the industry pulls it's collective head out of its backside and common names are agreed to then perhaps this can be realized. dp _______________________________________________ Help us build a comprehensive ClamAV guide: visit http://wiki.clamav.net http://lurker.clamav.net/list/clamav-users.html
