Crowdsourced, Cloud-Based Anti-Virus? Lots Of Buzzwords, But How Does It Work?

from the who-detects-what-now? dept

We've seen plenty of crowdsourced anti-spam apps, but Jesse points us to a company called Immunet that claims to be launching a free "cloud-based, collaborative anti-virus" solution. The idea is that people install it, and as soon as anyone detects a virus problem, that info is shared with all of the other users, thereby (in theory) working much faster than today's brand-name anti-virus products. However, I have to admit I can't figure out how this works. For anti-spam stuff it makes sense -- since anyone can recognize spam. But how can it work for anti-virus? Who's determining what the actual virus is? How is it protected against false positives? None of that's clear. I went through the company's website, and it seems to just skip right over the question of actually detecting the virus. It makes fun of the established anti-virus providers for taking too long in examining suspected viruses in their lab, but never explains how the detection occurs otherwise. In fact, about the only thing I can figure out from the company's own language is that it's going to simply use the virus definitions found in those other products installed on people's computers. If that's true, then it won't actually be any better or faster than those companies it was making fun of earlier. The whole thing sounds full of buzzwords and hype, but appears to have little substance.

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Web 2.0 Buzzword Bingo

from the say-what?!? dept

I'm going to remove the names of the two web 2.0 startups that apparently have just merged, according to a recent blog post from Jeff Nolan. I don't really care about the merger at all or either of the two companies. I'm merely posting a short excerpt from the press release announcing the merger with the names redacted (they don't deserve more publicity with a press release like this), because I don't think I've ever seen a paragraph filled with so many web 2.0 buzzwords that says absolutely nothing.

Company A, a universal profile service for the social web that engages communities and enables content discovery, today announced its acquisition of Company B, a provider of semantic intelligence solutions. The integration of Company B's proprietary semantic intelligence-based discovery engine will bring richer, context-based profile and reputation management capabilities to the Company A service. To be useful across different types of social media, profiles and reputation have to be localized and linked to the context of the conversation. In this way, thought leaders emerge within and across communities based on their specific expertise and contributions.

Seriously? From that paragraph, does anyone have the slightest idea what either of these companies do -- or what the merger is for? I've been known to point out stupid PR tricks, which focus mostly on the way they continue to bombard me with pointless and irrelevant press releases. But when the buzzword bingo gets this thick, it's hard to do anything but sit back and laugh. That, and get to work on my latest proprietary universal social widget-enabler intelligence-context-based profiler management integrator. Because, clearly, that's what the market demands.

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