Bah, Humbug

That's irritating. I use Norton antivirus software. This morning it started complaining that there was a risk, something was wrong with the firewall, something was wrong with phishing, and it refused to run a scan. When I started Word, it told me that there was something wrong with my Symantics license, please click here. Click here brought up a page which suggested that I download and run some little application to fix my license file. After fiddling with this for a while, I got it to run. But it didn't clear up the problem.

Then in poking around, I clicked on the line that shows I have many days left in the current license. This ran something that claimed to be looking for a server and brought up a web page that also assured me I have plenty of days left. And somewhere in there, a miracle occurred - Norton healed itself. Suddenly the red x's were gone, replaced by cheerful green checkmarks. And we're all happy again. No warning when I run Word, able to scan at a single click, wow.

So what was the problem? Did Norton just want to phone home, and this is the way it asks for permission?

Antivirus software should not act like a virus infection. If it has a problem, it should say so - without acting like nagware!

Weird.