It's no pleasure to write this, but it happens again and again. Another false positive from a competitor about one of our products.

This time, it affects our surprise for the 1.4 release. In the past months, our developers have prepared Spybot-S&D for the next platform that is currently getting endangered. Spybot-S&D for Symbian cell phones is sitting here on our hard disks, and we planned to release it as RCs along with the 1.4 RCs, and - if everything runs smooth - the final along with the Spybot-S&D 1.4 for Windows final.

The release of this suprise package is currently obstructed by its detection as a virus. Since it seems a useful communication has started today, we hope for a soon fix, and that the future will bring less news of this kind.

Which leads me back to the old topic. The press is reporting more and more about spyware, which is good, since people need to be informed about it. Many news articles also contain overviews over the detection rates of anti-spyware, which is good as well. But most anti-spyware companies, including many reputated ones, seem to entangle themselves in a fight for the best detection rate at the expense of quality. These days, it seems to be better to misflag some legit software, just to raise the rate.
With a dozen false positives about Spybot-S&D alone, I wonder what the real false positive rate about non-security related software would be? Security-related software should be on the prerelease test list of any anti-spyware maker and gets flagged anyway...

Our call to the press: When writing reviews and comparisons of anti-spyware software, start to care about quality in addition to quantity!

Our call to our competitors: Stop this insanity of fighting for the best rate where it goes at the expense of quality, thus at the expense of the customer!

Our call to our users: We probably could double our output if we would reduce our testing to a minimum, and we want to know what our users would prefer. Do you want a high output rate at the expense of more likely false positives, or do you want quality output, even it's less? Please mail us your opinion to qs-detectionrate@safer-networking.org!