Re: 17 & 20 November Downloads

[Richard Shann]

On Tue, 2021-11-30 at 12:28 +0000, Joe Wilkinson wrote:
>  Hi Richard,
>  I may have found it.
>  I have McAfee virus protection on my PC, courtesy of BT.
>  I downloaded the 2.5 Version from the website and it Typeset fine
>  When I tried extracting the Nov30 download using the Windows Extract
> as opposed to 7-Zip I got a message to say that I had been protected
> from an unspecified threat!
This is presumably a false positive (as the file is created by
compiling on a machine running a Unix type operating system, it would
quite convoluted to infect it). I can see why these programs want to
flag up anything that happens to contain a particular sequence of bytes
as they want to be seen to work quickly, but I don't understand why
they don't see a need to then look more closely. They don't provide a
practical route for submitting false positives either - I imagine
commercial software can threaten to sue them and get them to whitelist
their offerings...

Did the other machine you tested run the same brand of anti-virus?

Richard