Norton 360 Antivirus? If so, it's probably the Norton Sonar protection component, which you can selectively disable without turning off the entire antivirus.

Some antivirus programs use a 'whitelist' strategy. Any file they don't recognize they assume is bad. This is beneficial for your average computer user who downloads "Greeting cards" that random spam emails link them to. This gives amusing results to indie developers:



(A game I was working on with a few friends online some years back - yea, we did have too few users, Norton - thanks for rubbing it in)

By the by, as much as I liked Norton, neither Norton Antivirus or any other major anti-virus program does a perfect job. So when it came time to re-subscribe, I just uninstalled it and migrated to Microsoft Security Essentials, which is freely available and is fairly decent, less intrusive and annoying, and less CPU-heavy. That, combined with Spybot Search and Destroy (also free), coupled with a secure browser (Google Chrome) and the same cautious behavior that I'm sure you (and every computer-savy user) also possess, keeps me and my familys' computers secure (except when someone falls for a trick link - maybe twice a year - which then required manual intervention).

Save yourself the cost of a anti-virus subscription - they all do a mediocre job, the problem is still the user, and you might as well use the free ones like the one Microsoft provides coupled with SpyBot.

Avast flags anything using GNU gettext compiled with any version of MinGW I've seen as "Malware" and considers many other executables as "dangerous" because none in their "community" has had the same file scanned before, too. The only workable solution is to uninstall all this shit (whitelisting the compiler and the development partition doesn't work properly). Kaspersky is even worse.

I've submitted bug reports considering the gettext thing repeatedly too, only reaction was the usual keep-consumer-busy-with-nonsense dance without much effect.

So chances are that whatever-you-use is just as bad. Antivirus live panic just doesn't work well with development. Heuristic scanners are pathetic and signature-based ones are not much better, so they will gratiously flag anything they haven't whitelisted as malware. Also, the perceived threat makes users more likely to spend money on malware and accept the detrimental impact of AV software on their system (which is often worse than the impact caused by the actual malware).

It's much the same as if your governmental thugs kill a few people by crashing an airplane into a building and later arrest some presumed "bombers". The perceived threat makes people much more compliant with other measures (giving up privacy rights, going to war) that they would never accept otherwise.

And I thought this thread is about "How to create a C++ executable file that antiviruses label them as viruses?" or "How to create a virus?" type of thread.

And boy my anticipation and excitement skyrocketed... and dropped like dubstep.

If one thing I hate about anti virus, it would be labeling a lot of compressed exe as virus - and this include Microsoft own anti virus.

I love watching a lot of 64k intros, and some big demos .exe are compressed too, for whatever reasons.

Who has his programming pc online anyways ?

I do, for example. What's wrong with being connected to the internet as such? It's not like you couldn't make a modern system secure against intrusion from outside (even Windows can be made secure).

It's the stuff you download and execute you have to worry about, but then again it's not any more dangerous than anything you install/execute off a CDROM or an USB stick.

Your AV software must be detecting that your code is infected with GPL. You're going to have to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Is anti-virus still needed? I thought Windows had become good enough to not require it anymore.