I do know that some people here work to make anti-virus software, but these commercials have 2 things going for them:
1. The supposed humor
2. The scare tactic
First one is a little funny about making up new curse words:
http://bcove.me/nxia1beq (http://bcove.me/nxia1beq)
But the 2nd one is just plain mean:
http://bcove.me/8njbsjai (http://bcove.me/8njbsjai)
You know who you are, and this is their attempt to decrease your install base. But every experienced geek knows Norton is so bloated and heavy on system resources that it interferes with a lot of the things you do.
Anyways, thought I'd share. And this campaign is apparently Canada only, and this is one exception where it's NOT on YouTube and not on Google.
...Wow. That's just downright insulting. Norton, is about the last thing I'd install. Now even more-so. I'll stick with Kaspersky, a hardware firewall, a good hosts-file, and common sense, thanks.
hooray for norton being inconsiderate douchebags like they have always been, now its more personal and they are going to lose alot more of the market because of it
Or do what I do, and recommend against the Swiss cheese that is Windows in the first place? ;) Nothing can fix stupid - people will download and run various OS'es equivalents of 'virus.exe' no matter what they're using, of course, but minimizing attack vectors starts with using secure software in the first place. With (http://www.ubuntu.com/) plenty (http://fedoraproject.org/) of (http://www.pcbsd.org/) examples (http://www.apple.com/ca/) - all of which are varying degrees of user-friendly, and all of which are much more secure out of the box than Windows.
Most people are sitting behind home routers that should be properly configured as hardware firewalls (only forward ports you're SURE you want to forward) and/or NAT, though in the case of laptops I'd recommend a software firewall as well - and the 'stock' ones are all actually quite decent, Windows Firewall included. If you must run Windows, most anti-virus software can be a bit of a joke, however, especially for dragging your machine's performance down (unless you like having a spare core available to scan everything), and with Microsoft Security Essentials basically being perfectly adequate for home use, I'd honestly just stick with that. The key is making sure you stay on top of all of your updates - A/V, system, your browsers (and for the love of your deity, ditch Internet Explorer!), and anything made by Adobe (Acrobat, Flash, etc.) because they're notorious for swiss-cheese software as well. By the time vendors release patches for security flaws, there's typically been exploits for them out in the wild for days, if not weeks; you don't want to risk things even longer.
Honestly, I'm personally of the mindset that people should be forced to take a simple test/get licensed before they're allowed to use a computer hooked up to the Internet - just the basics of 'don't run shit you don't trust completely', 'don't assume e-mail is from who it says it's from', that kind of thing - and if your ISP detects your machine has been turned into a virus-blasting spam bot, you get disconnected until it's fixed. c.c Would fix so many problems and we wouldn't need all this crap in the first place. :/
Hey, I'm one of those people that works on Microsoft Security Essentials. I think it's perfectly adequate; if you wanted, you certainly could get a different antivirus that puts its tendrils everywhere and get better raw protection.
Also, install the patches as soon as they're out. After they're released, attackers reverse-engineer the differences between the patched executable and the previous version, and usually have an exploit out within a day.