Interesting, hopefully more people will see what a crummy company Symantec is and they lose some business. Whether it is a malicious program or not, they are definitely trying cover it up. I will be keeping tabs on this and waiting for Symantecs explanation.

This is why I don't use Norton. 4chan? I guess ATS isn't safe from its vile name Symantec is known for adding "additional" software and code with its products. Trying to access something in Africa? How did they find that out?

norton is a nightmare these days. i bought a new pc recently and it had a trial version pre installed.

after uninstalling it, i had an endless world of pain with the pc. its like they deliberatley make it an impossible task of a clean uninstall.

after seaching google it was clear millions of others were in the same boat!!!

This Pifts.exe seems a bit strange . Take my advice and do not use norton. Norton uses WAY too much system resources.

New post from 4chan. pretty interesting.

>I was on the phone with Symantec from 9:00pm PST until 11:00 and got basically no decent answers. They finally admitted it was part of the install process but couldn't tell me what it was for. Every time that I asked why messages were being removed from the Forum, I got transferred to someone else. I started at Tech Support talking to Ella, then got tranferred to Sam in the Virus Removal Dept. I asked him the same questions, then finally I asked to speak to a Supervisor, and got Frank the floor supervisor. He said that it was not a virus but a "System File Issue" and he would have to transfer me to Technical Support.
>System File Issue
I HAVE GREAT FAITH IN THESE PEOPLE.

>My question was again ignored and he then wanted to enter my computer remotely and look for viruses.
...

ohohoho

After the person hung up:

>He called right back and told me he wanted to transfer me to his Supervisor since I was obviously not satisfied with my call.

I haven't seen a systematic removal of "data" like this in a while. It takes a bit of people to do damage control like this. The things to note here are the Washington Swapdrive ip address and microsoft search companion originating in the executables encoding and the fact that there's a bunch of useless padding in the file. As explained on one of the forums its comparable to someone filling half a page of paper with xx's and oo's just to fill up the sheet of paper so it would match another like it. Normally padding like that is not included in a file for any reason its sloppy coding. Baton down your hatches folks this reeks of mass data mining, or something more sinister which i wont mention. (WHERE THE SPYBOT ACTUALLY JUMPS OUT OF THE COMPUTER AT YOU)

But really tho make sure to uninstall norton products they suck to begin with use avg or something, anything else but norton products. You will thank me later

[edit on 10-3-2009 by Localjoe3]

S+F'd.

I've been watching this on the new 4chan thread. Interesting stuff, but it seems like we aren't getting very far. I think we'll find out more in the morning.

I looked up the:

G O E C 6 2 ~ 1 . D L L

thing we found before.

Symantec accesses Google Desktop.

G O E C 6 2 ~ 1 . D L L is Google Desktop.

They ARE recording searches-- Google Desktop interacts with IE, too, so... just, #.

There you go. Symantec is recording what you search for on Google.

This could also be tied to Yahoo wanting to sabotage Google as the top search engine.

ATS has been contacted by Symantec and threatened to sue ATS if we don't delete the topic. I'll delete the thread in a couple of minutes...


...

I'm just kidding.

I'm just curious why the reference to South Africa. For one South Africa doesn't have a very strong Internet infrastructure. Our connection speed isn't nearly as fast as say the US, and I can't imagine that our infrastructure is good enough to handle a sudden surge of all Norton users' data coming its way. And secondly, I can't imagine who in South Africa would want such information. Yes, Symantec has a strong market share in SA, but strong enough to pull some stunt? I don't know...

Edit to add bold.

[edit on 10-3-2009 by Gemwolf]