

Google beefs up its security by acquiring online virus scanner VirusTotal - mukyu
http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/09/07/google-just-acquired-free-online-virus-scanner-utility-virustotal/

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mmaunder
Question: Does virustotal scrape data from Norton, McAfee and the 20 to 50
scanning engines they use, or do they have a paid licensing arrangement with
them? [I use the term scraping loosely e.g. they could run the file against a
local instance of each scanner, upload the file to other websites, etc]

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huhtenberg
I'm pretty sure they have a set of servers each running a licensed copy of
every AV software they support, all scripted and automated in some form or
fashion. I am really puzzled as to why Google needed to acquire them. It
surely wasn't a technology acquisition.

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dpeck
They've got a hell of a dataset and lot of users/partners that push sample
data to them all the time. Even if they lose some of those because people
don't want to deal with GOOG its still huge information source that they will
probably be able to put to better use than most anyone else.

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ChuckMcM
Good move on their part, although I'm surprised they weren't able to create
something like this in-house. Basically if you crawl every freakin' web page
on the internet you pretty much should find all the bad guy's landing pages.

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throwaway54-762
It might be prohibitively expensive (think: CPU time and memory required to
run a virus scanner (multiple virus scanners?) on every unique page on the
internet).

Edit: Plus, per-machine licenses, and profitability -- how much is it worth vs
blacklisting manually?

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toomuchtodo
Computing time will ALWAYS be cheaper than human labor.

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michael_miller
I'm not sure I agree with this. When operating at a very large scale, like
Google, eeking out tiny gains in efficiency can yield huge cost savings. A 1%
saving of CPU time on a 100K core cluster means 1,000 cores can be eliminated
from the system. Figure $50 per core, and you've just saved $50,000 in base
cost, plus a ton on cooling + power. Meaning, if it takes less than 3 dev-
months, it is absolutely worth the developer time to optimize.

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ChuckMcM
This is absolutely a true statement, and its wrong :-) Until the proposals for
energy proportional computing [1] bear fruit there is a lot of 'sunk cost'
going into the infrastructure. So finding useful work to do with that sunk
cost is a net win.

[1] <http://research.google.com/pubs/pub33387.html>

