?$%!@%^& anti-virus!

[NoCforMe]

We all know what a pain in the ass some antivirus packages are when it comes to annoying things like blocking us from running our own software that we create with MASM and other packages.

It went up to a whole new level with me. A couple months ago I started having problems sending email to certain people. Some recipients were no problem, but I was getting a lot of bounced messages from certain recipients, always because of the same issue: "bare line feeds", whatever TF that is. Not only annoying but infuriating. I thought the problem was Outlook (my SMTP account is with them, and I use a good old mail client--Thunderbird in this case--rather than web mail). I wrote to Outlook tech support with a complaint but never heard back from them.

Well, yesterday I was trying yet again to solve this problem when I ran across a post in a forum on the Thunderbird site. Someone wrote that the problem was caused by their antivirus program adding an attachment or signature to their outgoing emails, which screwed them up. So I went to the AVG control panel, found this option and disabled it. Sure enough, my emails started getting through.

So AVG was doing something (something enabled by default that was causing my sending of emails to fail! Thanks a lot!

The other thing is this error itself. I have no fucking idea what a "bare line feed" is and why it's such a bad thing; a violation of some damn RFC or other. And up until a couple months ago it was no problem, even though at that time I was (unknowingly) sending out emails with this offending construct. Then Micro$oft decided to tighten their SMTP protocols and started rejecting emails with "bare line feeds". With no way to fix the problem other than the usual useless "try another email client" (which one?).

Question: Does anyone here know anything about "bare line feeds" and why they must be rejected? I'm curious to know.

The other infuriating thing is that this only happened with certain recipients, so apparently the problem originated with their tight-assed rejection of non-conforming emails.

I'm so glad we live in a world with well-coordinated, smoothly functioning protocols regarding our primary means of communication. Gives me much confidence in the continued survival of the species ...

[Vortex]

Hi NoCforMe,

We all know what a pain in the ass some antivirus packages are when it comes to annoying things like blocking us from running our own software that we create with MASM and other packages.

They are against free software, this is why they are deliberately blocking applications coded with Masm.

As a home user, the best solution is to get rid of the AV crap and use an application like SandBoxie while accessing the net. You don't event need sandbox applications if you don't visit suspicious web sites.

[NoCforMe]

Hi NoCforMe,

We all know what a pain in the ass some antivirus packages are when it comes to annoying things like blocking us from running our own software that we create with MASM and other packages.

They are against free software, this is why they are deliberately blocking applications coded with Masm.

Are you sure about that? I may be cynical, but it's hard for me to believe that they'd go to all that trouble for what amounts to a tiny fraction of software out there. Why would they even bother? Any evidence for this claim?

It seems to me just to be a case of over-caution on their part. Or maybe there really are viruses out there which match patterns found in Masm32 programs.

I wonder: do AV programs become suspicious when they detect code produced by assembly language? Pretty sure they can determine what kind of compiler produced an executable; maybe they view ASM code in general as suspect?

[Vortex]

Hi NoCforMe,

Are you sure about that? I may be cynical, but it's hard for me to believe that they'd go to all that trouble for what amounts to a tiny fraction of software out there. Why would they even bother? Any evidence for this claim?

It seems to me just to be a case of over-caution on their part. Or maybe there really are viruses out there which match patterns found in Masm32 programs.

No need of evidences. They are simply trying to scare people so they call sell more AV. Also, M$ would promote their C\C++ compilers and not Masm as the C\C++ compiler set is much more profitable. Small applications are a good source of pretext for those AV guys to scare people. Have a look at this thread and you can see the AV comedy :

http://masm32.com/board/index.php?topic=9811.0

Simply, they don't want folks to practice the assembly language. For them, nothing profitable in this area.

[hutch--]

There is probably another factor that is much bigger than apps coded in MASM, Unix/Linux generally uses a single line feed character instead of the DOS format of CR/LF and it would appear that a hidden restriction like this is aimed at the Linux crew.

[daydreamer]

Simply, they don't want folks to practice the assembly language. For them, nothing profitable in this area.

is that why decision to VC++ 64bit doesnt support inline asm ?and maybe the sell the concept of intrinsics instead of inline asm?


 

[TimoVJL]

Avast / AWG have had problems with their heuristics a long time.
Once they didn't like Pelles C crt at all and don't like other debug format than MS.
TLPEView was in their list sometimes and i had to send reports.

[hutch--]

I would agree with that comment, many of the low end AV scanners don't properly understand the PE32 and PE64 formats and reject code that is not written specifically with the VC range of compilers.

Magnus, the internal complexity of some C compilers made it difficult to embed inline asm. This is why Microsoft supply MASM 64 bit so you can write VC/VS compatible modules if you need them. Often the intrinsics do the job OK but if they are not up to pace, ml64 in the right hands can do better, then link it into the VC/VS code.

[Vortex]

is that why decision to VC++ 64bit doesnt support inline asm ?and maybe the sell the concept of intrinsics instead of inline asm?

Good point. M$ removed important high level contructs from ml64.