Avira pulls off the dirtiest trick on Avast!

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
61

The blog post now doesn’t have any mention of Avira now…I suppose we can take this as meaning that ALWIL/Avira have come to an agreement (or are working it out between themselves) so there is now no need for that to be on the blog anymore.

IMHO, good.

  1. I feel it wasn’t necessary in the first place
  2. I feel it distracted from the main point of the blog post itself, as did many of the comments…all it did was cause arguements…

-Scott-

BTW, it is technically a different blog post…the other has been removed…

62

Seems the intention was fulfilled: the removal of the redirection.
But I always get sad when things that you’ve written get censored or just deleted… Don’t you think so?

63

Yes, I don’t particularly like it either…some of my post was relevant to the other content in that blog too…now I can’t find it on the RSS feed either, but there are others that are still there…

64

I guess any settlement would include the removal of what had to be an embarrassment to Avira.

After a lack of response from Avira through other media, telephone and emails, the avast blog and other sources started to get legs and the CEO of Avira effectively had to visit the avast blog, to attempt to justify (but never did) what they were doing only to say they deleted the avast.eu domain name, case closed.

That if anything made me mad as the redirection was still happening at the time of his post, so I pointed that out so it was hardly case closed. Not to long after that post the redirection ceased and the original blog and comments were removed.

I too feel that the original should blog and comments should have remained albeit locked as multiple other sources linked to that blog. Anyone visiting the original link would only get a custom 404 error and wonder about why it was removed, censored, etc.

All in all not a good situation.

65

??? AFAIK, avast.eu is still redirected to avira.com, nothing changed at all.

66

Me too, avast.eu still redirects to www.avira.com >:(
To Firefox users: Clear cache and try again. I don’t know why, but once I see the redirection, I can’t see any redirection until I delete avast.eu cache.

67

Now its back, I don’t know why that is, but it just shows that what the Avira CEO said in the deleted avast blog “case closed, etc. etc.” isn’t worth the paper it wasn’t written on.

So back to their underhand tactics which says very much about their companies ethics, morals and professionalism NOT.

68

What is back? Some of the comments? The majority of them were ripped out ::slight_smile:

69

No the redirect of avast.eu to antivir.com.

70

I can’t believe… Are these guys joking?
First it was dropped, now it’s back.
First the comments disappeared from the blog, now only part of them are back…

71

The comments that are ‘back’ in that ‘new/modified’ blog aren’t actually back but posted after the new/modified blog was posted. So it doesn’t look like any of the comments of the original blog have been reinstated.

72

Edited

73

tech don’t be scared, be responsible :smiley:

or i may say congrats!!!

74

Hitting that link reminds me of rootkit behavior, not nice.

75

totally ridiculous. i can not believe this is back again

76

Just for the records, the redirection is still there ???
I just used Free Download Manager to see what was there, see the log.

00:36:08 03/04/2010 Starting download...
00:36:08 03/04/2010 GET / HTTP/1.1
Referer: -
Host: www.avast.eu
00:36:09 03/04/2010 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2010 03:36:10 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian)
X-UD-Host: webspace.udag.de
X-UD-Method: header
X-UD-Target: http://www.avira.com
Location: http://www.avira.com
Connection: close
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html


00:36:09 03/04/2010 Redirecting...
00:36:09 03/04/2010 Redirection succeeded. Opening new URL
00:36:09 03/04/2010 GET / HTTP/1.1
Referer: -
Host: www.avira.com
00:36:11 03/04/2010 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2010 03:36:11 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=96577428a15804de1a5223535edf8938; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Set-Cookie: AV_Lang=En; expires=Sun, 03-Apr-2011 03:36:11 GMT; path=/
location: /en/pages/index.php
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 0
Keep-Alive: timeout=4, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html


00:36:11 03/04/2010 Redirecting...
00:36:11 03/04/2010 Redirection succeeded. Opening new URL
00:36:11 03/04/2010 GET /en/pages/index.php HTTP/1.1
Referer: http://www.avira.com/en/pages/
Host: www.avira.com
00:36:11 03/04/2010 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2010 03:36:12 GMT
Server: Apache
Cache-Control: max-age=1200
Expires: Sat, 03 Apr 2010 05:50:48 +0200
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Keep-Alive: timeout=4, max=99
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html


00:36:12 03/04/2010 Opening file on the disk...
00:36:12 03/04/2010 File already exists. Rename to "index(1).php"
00:36:12 03/04/2010 Succeeded
00:36:12 03/04/2010 [Section 1] - Started
00:36:12 03/04/2010 [Section 1] - Downloading
00:36:12 03/04/2010 Creating new section...
00:36:12 03/04/2010 Cancelled
00:36:13 03/04/2010 [Section 1] - Done
00:36:13 03/04/2010 Download complete

Anyway, why don’t we end up with this the easy way?
ALWIL gets avast.eu, Avira GmbH gets antivir.cz, everyone happy, flame war ends.
If not, maybe we’ll be seeing soon legal threats between two major AV vendors, while they should be spending that money :wink: protecting their customers from the real bad guys.

77

You obviously haven’t read the full information about this or you wouldn’t say that.

avast previously have antivir.cz and antivir.com (which means antivirus in the Czech language) which they used. Some years ago they released antivir.com (a worldwide domain) to Avira and they retained antivir.cz which they use in the Czech Republic.

So if this was such an issue for Avira why didn’t they negotiate with avast at the time they bought antivir.com a couple of years ago ???

Not to mention we aren’t talking about a country specific domain like .cz but one that encompasses many countries in Europe, with the use of a .eu domain name.

78

Well, that was back when AVIRA was called AntiVir. And it kinda made sense back then. But today, it’s called AVIRA and chasing the antivir.cz domain is just a hunting for common name. However avast.eu is not related to AVIRA in trillion light years, so AVIRA holding it on purpose is indeed a dirty business practice and even though i don’t have anything against AVIRA as an app (because it’s pretty good in some aspects), i find this quite offensive.

79

+1

80

Not only offensive but how could I still trust and make business with a company that have such practice? sorry thumb down Avira for me…