Don't Bug Me!

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

The best computer toy I ever lost was a demo disc of PC viruses I came across about a decade back. The software was a sort of digital rogues' gallery, intended to "educate" the user by demonstrating how certain bugs behaved. Activate the "Cascade" demo, for instance, and letters would pop out of your text like rotten teeth and collect in a pile at the bottom of your screen. These domesticated viruses weren't infectious like their cousins in the wild. If you just removed the floppy from the PC, the mischief would cease.

Back then, such faux viruses were the only strains most PC users would encounter, since the real ones were pretty much confined to college campuses, where people swapped floppies with dewy-eyed abandon. But now, as everyone knows, genuine viruses--nasty, infectious, hard-drive-trashing ones--are far more common, thanks to e-mail-borne bugs that mutate faster than a walking catfish at Three Mile Island. So what's an e-mail magnet like me to do?

I've been trying out the newest way to protect oneself: a browser-based service from McAfee.com that promises to keep any PC bug-free. Note that I said service rather than software. For $30 a year, you subscribe to McAfee.com's "Clinic," which will protect your Net-connected computer with a program that's constantly updated with the latest digital fumigants. McAfee.com's approach is an example of what's known as an Application Service Provider, a recent trendlet among Net businesses. Increasingly, software companies deliver their stuff to you exclusively online, in tiny installments that they can automatically upgrade and maintain--you don't do a thing. Within a few years, software that comes in a box or on a CD-ROM will go the way of milk delivered in bottles.

So, how did the new service work? The setup experience was definitely promising. I signed up for an account, and McAfee quickly uploaded a small program to my machine and installed it. The process was faster than it would have been by disc and took up a negligible amount of drive space. Every morning when I came to work, McAfee delivered a bug report that detailed any new plagues that had broken out overnight and then inoculated my software automatically.

My only real concern was the way ActiveShield, McAfee's antivirus applet, handled infected e-mail. As a test, I sent myself a live virus--it was iloveyou, which lived benignly on my Macintosh (a platform, by the way, that doesn't suffer nearly as badly from viruses as the PC world does). Disturbingly, my PC was more than happy to accept the poisoned e-mail. It even let me read the message. I'm told that had I actually clicked on the infected attached file to view it, ActiveShield would have intervened and caught the bug. A better way to handle it, in my opinion, would have been to notify me of the infected attachment--at the time the e-mail first arrived. That's the way most antivirus programs work, and it makes sense for me. Why? Sometimes I forward mail without looking at the attachments; in this case I would have spread a digital disease. A McAfee spokesman told me the company would fix this problem. In the meantime, I've got to find that virus demo disc. It will really spook my wife. Find a new product review every day at www.timedigital.com Questions for Josh? You can e-mail him at jquit@well.com