100% protection? we know what that means!

page: MessageLabs Services: Virus Protection - FAQs

excerpt: "MessageLabs offer all new customers 100% guaranteed protection on all known and unknown viruses (in applicable countries). If we do let a virus infect any of our customers, they will be refunded a month's premium."

can you spot the snake-oil?

"100% guaranteed protection on all known and unknown viruses" sort of flies in the face of the 2 decade old realization that detecting all possible viruses is reducible to the halting problem and therefore is not possible....

but wait, it gets better!

page: MessageLabs

excerpt: "The only solution in the world to provide complete 100% protection against all known and unknown virus, trojan and other malware threats, even during critical 'zero-hour' outbreaks before anti-virus signatures are available."

it's not just viruses that they guarantee 100% detection of, it's basically all malware, including trojans... somehow, the difficulty the rest of the known universe has with context sensitivity of trojan classification just isn't a problem for them...

i think they must have licensed dr. solly's perfect.bat technology - you know the batch file that says everything is a virus and thus has a 100% detection rate (the 100% false positive rate is just an unfortunate side effect)...

where does the industry dig up these snake-oil marketers? haven't they learned their lesson yet?

as always, folks - vote with your wallet... when companies go bad the only thing left that they will understand is market pressure...