Counting since 9.11.2005 <http://lipas.uwasa.fi/~ts/garbinfo/garb0120.html> Copyright © 1996-2007 by Prof. Timo Salmi Last modified Fri 2-Mar-2007 15:49:50

A virus at Garbo?

Thank you for reporting the problem. Garbo's disclaimer states among other things: "Although we naturally do our best to assure that all the material is bona fide shareware, freeware or public domain material, and free of viruses, the user has to accept all the responsibility and risks of having and using the files from garbo.uwasa.fi archives. It is a sensible and recommended habit to always scan any downloaded material, whatever the source, with the latest versions of the virus scanners."

That out of the way, experience shows that the overwhelmingly most likely course of events is that you already had the virus on your system and detected it going through your new download from Garbo. In fact, during Garbo's entire existence there is one single incident where a virus was found on a file at Garbo. Other than that nothing virulent has unequivocally made it through our sieve. Of course, it is not absolutely impossible, but so far, save for that one incident, all the reports have been caused by reasons other than a virus in the original package at Garbo.

Another source of alarms is the false positives. They are rare, but they do occur. A tell-tale sign of a false positive is that only one of the many virus scanners reports the alleged infection. The author of the virus scanner, the author of the triggering program and yours truly might wish to know of such observations.