Malware is growing to become more and more randomized, and one of the consequences of this is a growing risk of false positives in any anti-malware product. Just testing on more and more laboratory machines never covers the whole live situation out there though, so we thought about a different, more community-like, approach: we've decided to implement a distributed computing concept to back up our internal testing.

You may know existing distributed computing projects: Seti@home for example uses the power of a huge community to look for extra-terrestrial live, Folding@home uses a huge community as well to possibly find more understanding about diseases like cancer. Spybot-S&D Distributed Testing (SDDT) isn't helping you to make phone calls to Alpha Centauri, nor does it cure diseases, but then, it's also not really taking that much processing time away as if you would use them. It uses the same community power though: the results of the scans of many real live machines, maybe including yours, will help us make safer and even faster updates available!

This project has been available as a beta for half a year, and now we're looking for more participants. Don't be afraid of it slowing down your system - it's not working continuously as the aforementioned clients are, it operates in a user-defined interval, and then only scans small databases, taking a few seconds usually. You can also have it submit your scans anonymously, or, if you want to use the new feature to view any of your previous scan results in your User Control Panel on our forums, provide an email address.

If you want to help, feel free to head over to the forum and download the client. Also, expect more announcements regarding the quantity of detections as well next week...

Eight years ago, Spybot-S&D originally started off as a very fast anti-spyware scanner, detecting some 30 small things, and you could watch it finish in under a minute.

Today, a full scan applies more than 600,000 tests, and you can watch that number grow weekly on our update list. Handling such numbers obviously is quite a bit different, and while we've tried to adjust to that with each version, a full scan might still take half an hour currently. Since this was one big major complaint issue, we decided to integrate parts of the new file scanner designed for a future 2.0 release and optimized for modern malware fighting, and got you a major push in speed now - that same scan will now take five to six minutes only, being about five times as fast as 1.5 was!

If you want to enjoy that speed and know a bit about beta testing, head over to our beta forums and get the first beta! If you prefer to wait for a thoroughly tested public release, we hope to get around to that quite soon.

Oh, and one more thing... there's more up for 1.6: a second big issue we hear often will be addressed, so stay tuned!

Modern Windows versions allow you to set up multiple users with differentiated rights, ranging from administrators to regular users. For various reasons, ranging from default installation settings over the requirements of carelessly written software to laziness, most Windows users are using an user account with administrator privileges in their daily work.

Windows also allows you to run each application with the privileges of a chosen user account. So, while we grudgingly accepted that we won't change people to use restricted user accounts in their daily work, we've decided to pursue a compromise: determine which applications are endangered the most, and allow the user to run those with restricted rights only.

Now, since comfort is the issue that's restricting most users, either directly or through people having set up their system, from using restricted user accounts, we tried to make this process to be as easy as possible, which resulted in Alter Ego. Alter Ego is an application that makes your browser, email application, instant messenger and multimedia player run safer with just three clicks: click here for an animated demonstration.

Visit this forum thread for more information and discussion.