This was written a year ago. Keep in mind that I'm not saying AV isn't useful - it is in some situations. However, I'm of the opinion that the "AV age", where AV companies battle it out to innovate and beat the competition, is pretty much over. It's not useful against any determined attacker, and it's ridiculously easy to bypass AV simply by changing a few bytes here or there, or by running it through whatever random packer you found on some forum.
Yes, general purpose computing does necessitate some form of filtering, but there are much better solutions than AV in most cases. Mobile platforms like iOS / Android can be locked down quite well - install what you want and then lock installations. Desktop OSes like Windows, Linux and OS X are harder to deal with, but there are still protective measures that can be taken, such as whitelisting, that are more effective than any AV.
This was written a year ago. Keep in mind that I'm not saying AV isn't useful - it is in some situations. However, I'm of the opinion that the "AV age", where AV companies battle it out to innovate and beat the competition, is pretty much over. It's not useful against any determined attacker, and it's ridiculously easy to bypass AV simply by changing a few bytes here or there, or by running it through whatever random packer you found on some forum.
Yes, general purpose computing does necessitate some form of filtering, but there are much better solutions than AV in most cases. Mobile platforms like iOS / Android can be locked down quite well - install what you want and then lock installations. Desktop OSes like Windows, Linux and OS X are harder to deal with, but there are still protective measures that can be taken, such as whitelisting, that are more effective than any AV.