I've been a Norton user for several years since it was recoded and certainly like it. But this is unacceptable.
Sure it's unacceptable and maybe, if you (as a Norton customer) would report that is unacceptable for your that their product mistakenly block a legit product as a threat, they might start to hear it and do something about.
Unfortunately, I given up hope with Symantec, it's their entire program logic that is blatantly flawed, with their absurd "reputation" system. Yes, when you see a report that Couatl.exe is being "infected" by the "WS.Reputation", make it sound as if it was a virus, that's a shameful way to cover their product flawed design.
"WS.Reputation" (if this is the report you got, which is the most common from Norton), is NOT a virus name! It's an indication that a file has been blocked because it hasn't gained enough "reputation" with THEM! This means, every time we update Couatl.exe, and it happens fairly often, because we obviously continue to update it, its reputation with Symantec goes back to zero.
Yes, of course, we can report the issue to Symantec, and I did it countless of times. The result is always the same, and it always happen as a two steps process:
1) When I send the 1st false-positive report, by sending the Couatl.exe for examination, a copy&pasted reply from a Symantec representative arrives, saying that the .exe that has been sent is NOT detected by the antivirus, and they can't replicate the issue.
2) When I reply to this, explaining this .exe is contained in many installers, and is also downloaded online because of the Live Update feature (yes, they even block our site...), the reply is always they WILL white-list it in their next virus update definitions.
That's why their entire design logic is flawed: since they CANNOT recognize a virus there ( of course they can't, there is none... ) but they see a file that has no reputation, when the file is white-listed, is ONLY the file itself, but all the installers that *contains* it don't get any benefit from their white-listing.
We should ideally send every new installer to Symantec, which would amount to several 3GB of data every week or so, which doesn't make any sense, just to conform to their flawed logic.
Another developer ( that doesn't have anything to do with flight simulation ) view on the flawed Norton "reputation" system:
http://www.codeandweb.com/blog/2012/06/23/how-symantec-ruins-independent-developersMaybe ESET would be a better choice?
Everything would be a better choice. But I keep asking myself why anyone would want to spend any money on an antivirus, or even worse to keep an antivirus subscription current, when there are perfectly fine free alternatives. The MS antivirus is perfectly fine, is not bloated, is always kept updated, and it doesn't mistakenly detect any of our products as threats.
This is what I use since years, before MS Essentials, I used to like the free AVG, and never got ANY virus, ever.
Use the saved money to get more flight sim products, and support smaller developers, instead of such large corporation that profits over the fear of virus and, in order to get a marketing advantage over their competition (the free products don't need to do that), use very questionable heuristic methods to be able to boast the "more virus catched, even those not yet catalogued" catchphrases which means, basically, they just do wild guess at the risk of blocking legit programs, instead of doing the right thing, and blocking only what has been *proven* to be dangerous.
