According to computer scientists at the University of Michigan (UM), installing an antivirus software on your personal computer might soon become useless. The research team has used a new approach, called CloudAV, which moves antivirus functionality into the ‘network cloud’ and off personal computers.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1008&tag=nl.e539
I have doubts about this, What does everyone else think?
Hi marc57,
Must be a good initiative, because avast is part of the cloud.
polonus
Another apocalyptic prophet…
Now, each week there is a voice in the horizon: “hey, antivirus are dead, they won’t exist anymore…”.
CloudAV, hmm interesting name, aren’t clouds created by hot air and condension ;D
A slight hitch not all malware originates in that cloud, what about, CD/DVD, USB drives, Hard Disks (recent infected HDDs from the manufacturers), etc.
All of these would bypass the cloud even if they had a thin client on the system, that would require an internet connection, which would have to be always on. No use for dial-up users as the damage could be done before any connection exists.
It seems to me that all the malware would need to do is shut down the Internet connection and bang, no protection.
I think there is still much work to be done before this cloud has some substance ;D
Of course it needs more research, this article is just talking about the introduction to the research .
I think its a really neat concept, and might work well in large corporate environments where you have hundreds of computers connected to 1 network, because everyone knows general office workers have never and will never be able to correctly use anti virus software. 
There are still many issues though - what if they get a virus that isn’t detected by Cloud, etc. and how would these be identified / cleaned? But I’m sure these people will look into it, this could very well change corporate antivirus services. I don’t think its worthwhile in a home environment though.
How many times they proved that antiviruses will be useless and how some god send technology will save us all.
And what happened years later? We’re still using traditional antiviruses…
So much for all this bable talk…
… and their databases will be equal in size to their installation files.
Soon Avast’s off-line VDB-update file will be equal to 50% of the installation file. I believe that in 2-3 years off-line users will download 25-30 Mb weekly to update their Avasts.
Maybe you can have two versions of updates:
a) latest week or month.
b) whole update.
And the updater check if you need to download the whole update if you have a ‘very old’ virus database. Another companies do that. Also, protects bandwidth of download.
Blasphemy!!!
???
I meant it as saying that we dont need antivirus is Blasphemy
Hi justin-XP,
Not only we, everybody needs antivirus, as everybody needs a firewall.
Propagating a default OS, that is real blasphemous, and there still there are millions and millions that do this every day to make the Internet even more “broken” than it is,
polonus