News Intel buys McAfee

What made them choose McAfee if they just wanted expertise in the field there are surely cheaper companies. Any idea what patent McAfee could hold that intel would want need?

 

hmm, which games?, First time I ever heard Anti-virus software recking games(never experienced one), McAfee Antivirus from 1998 perhaps?hehe,

 

If they wanted an anti-virus company... why'd they buy McAfee?

Just three days ago I get called up by a cousin to cure a virus problem, get to his PC and see that McAfee is installed and ready, but doing f*** all to fix it. A quick system restore took care of the virus. Can't say I've ever had a decent experience with McAfee, but that was easily the worst. Maybe their encryption services are decent and Intel can use them otherwise I envision a wasted $7.7 billion.

 

I can only assume that they bought it to kill it.

 

Well if fact hardware based av are owned by Kaspersky. They have been granted a patents for them.

 

I heard the deal went down in patpong, thialands red light district

 

A) that was a bad investments... McAfee is horrible
B) Wouldnt implementing hardware AV being anti-competitive? I know Microsoft got sued up the ass when they wanted to have built in AV which would prevent the rest of the market from being able to sell what they offered.
and C) well I dont have a C other then this doesnt feel right lol.

 

Why McAfee? That software is a dog . . . buying someone like eset would have made much more sense

 

Awesome, as for the person who said AV crashes games maybe hes only use to playing with Pirated games? lol.

 

If it is hardware AV, I'll be worried. My nForce4 motherboard is supposed to have a hardware firewall. If I installed the drivers for it, it killed the networking. I'd be dubious about relying on hardware security again.
Plus, with software you have a choice. You can't just swap out bits of chips etc though.

 

And what keeps this from deleting an important Windows file? ...again?

 

I think this is the key point. I don't think this is about anti-virus software, but rather about hardware accelerated encryption. In fact, I can well see Intel killing off ar maybe selling the AV business in a few years, but keeping the encryption / data security parts of McAfee.

I know that there have been add on encryption accelerator cards on the market for a long time and Intel may be looking to create a hybrid hardware - software encryption system aimed at the server market.

To me this feels like a possible expansion of the HDCP concept. In addition to being able to encrypt and decrypt large quantities of data in real time, I can see this also being developed into a content control model similar to what Adobe does with Acrobat.

I know I'm probably not making a full lot of sense here, but I think that anti-vurus software is the least of what Intel was after.

 

Why McAfee? Every time I've had to fix virus or performance related problems on a computer owned by friends or family McAfee is somehow at least partially responsible. Freaking bloated, overpriced ineffective software.

Now avast is something I can get behind. Also, free.

 

Did you even bother to read Cthippo's post?

 

McAfee is going to be a subsidiarity of intel according to this ZDnet article: http://u.bb/A30 so maybe this is just a move to encrypted all data like HDCP does with video. although i think this is going to help intel its also gonna hurt them in a way. in other terms its not going to be a smooth deal.