<Glazblog/>

Kaspersky by AOL discontinued

By glazou on Tuesday 4 September 2007, 10:34 - AOHell - Permalink

AOL recently announced that they switched from Kaspersky to McAfee as their free anti-virus. This raised two problems :

  1. first, Kaspersky wants you to re-enter your activation code once a year !!! I hope you kept it !
  2. second, AOL discontinued auto-updates from their ftp site...

Warning : the contents following this warning section were removed from this post at 14:30+0200 on Kaspersky Labs' request. I replied the following :

1. if I were you, I would seriously reconsider this decision because
   people who got Kaspersky through AOL are _all_ going to uninstall
   your product. They got it for free anyway, and you were paid by AOL
   for that anyway. This set of "free customers" is excellent in terms
   of PR and buzz. Furthermore, people who got your product through AOL
   got no direct notification of any sort from AOL neither from
   Kaspersky. It means that they started discovering their antivirus
   does not work for a strange reason (cannot download a file error
   &x000008C or something) and they understand NOTHING about it. They're
   probably worried, and UPSET. That's bad for Kaspersky.
   What you probably want is to show how good at detecting viruses your
   technology is, not really how painful it is for YOUR customers
   because AOL dropped a contract with you...

At 16:24+0200, Kaspersky Labs mailed me back : "please put the page back again. AOL users should be able to update."... Mucho kudos to Kaspersky Labs !

At his point, you probably consider Kaspersky takes room for nothing on your hard-disk and are ready to uninstall it. DON'T DO IT !!! Just do the following to get your updates back :

  1. shutdown Kaspersky ActiveVirusShield. Closing the main window is not enough, please click on the systray icon and exit.
  2. locate the XML file listing the update servers. It's usually located in directory C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\AOL\AVP6\Data and the name of the file is aol-updcfg.xml
  3. edit that file and remove the two following lines 
    <site2 url="ftp://download.newaol.com/avs/update/mirror/" diff_url="diffs" weight="10000001" region="*" />
<site2 url="http://download.newaol.com/avs/update/mirror/" diff_url="diffs" weight="10000000" region="*" />
  4. save the file
  5. restart ActiveVirusShield and launch an update from the systray icon's contextual menu.

Done... You should see your update go fine as usual. /* Enjoy */