We've seen plenty of crowdsourced anti-spam apps, but Jesse points us to a company called Immunet that claims to be launching a free "cloud-based, collaborative anti-virus" solution. The idea is that people install it, and as soon as anyone detects a virus problem, that info is shared with all of the other users, thereby (in theory) working much faster than today's brand-name anti-virus products. However, I have to admit I can't figure out how this works. For anti-spam stuff it makes sense -- since anyone can recognize spam. But how can it work for anti-virus? Who's determining what the actual virus is? How is it protected against false positives? None of that's clear. I went through the company's website, and it seems to just skip right over the question of actually detecting the virus. It makes fun of the established anti-virus providers for taking too long in examining suspected viruses in their lab, but never explains how the detection occurs otherwise. In fact, about the only thing I can figure out from the company's own language is that it's going to simply use the virus definitions found in those other products installed on people's computers. If that's true, then it won't actually be any better or faster than those companies it was making fun of earlier. The whole thing sounds full of buzzwords and hype, but appears to have little substance.

It's been fairly amazing to watch the entertainment industry act as if every other industry is responsible for protecting its obsolete business model. Amazingly, it's been successful in convincing AT&T that this makes sense, despite the fact that doing so will almost certainly do more harm to AT&T. However, to its credit, Cary Sherman of the RIAA has said he doesn't think that ISPs should be forced by law to provide these filters. Instead, however, it looks like he's trying to convince other industries to step up and help the entertainment industry as well. His latest, as pointed out by Broadband Reports, is that one possibility would be for anti-spyware/anti-malware applications to also watch for the transfer of unauthorized copyright material. Sherman suggests that this would be one way to get around the question of people simply encrypting traffic to avoid ISP filters. What's not entirely clear, however, is why security firms would ever want to do such a thing, as it would almost certainly annoy their customers to no end.