Okay, jokers. I was going to gripe about this relationship I’m having with a new anti-virus software package that involved us trading blows–did I just say blows?–before we get it on but then you know what happened…I just keep going and going on like some tantric blog technique. So, BAM, we’ve got a whole separate place for me to spill the beans on the fuckers that made a program I want to love but always get spat on in the end. Better than what Symantec used to do to me…
Anyhow, go get it, suckers. Nothing instills confidence than a HOME FUCKING PAGE that can’t be found…at least they found the 404 to server that bitch up:
Yes! At least our 404 page works!
You can NOT suck enough, AVG.
UPDATE:
With so many hits, presumably because people are trying to find answers for this stupid problem, here’s what you need to know:
FSG is a compression app used by some malware authors since it wasn’t being picked up by AV software. So, AVG’s brilliant error message is really saying you should get rid of the infected file. My suggestion to you is to find the offending file and delete it from your system. About a third of the time or more, it turns out to be a system restore file. A forum post I found points to an article on turning off/on the system restore so you can properly dispose of the file in question. On the plus side, it doesn’t seem to be (so far) associated with a virus, just malware. Trust me, that’s a plus side.
Now if only AVG would just friggin remove the damned infection, we’d all be able to get some sleep…
OUT
Tags: 404, AVG, Home Page, Resident Shield, Runtime packed FSG
Yes!…. this page made the front page of Google results. So it got read. And appreciated. I’ve bookmarked the site. Who IS this guy, with so much venom in his digits? This is ranting as it should be, a true monument to our humanity.
You do understand that a file being compressed has nothing to do with it being malware or not hence the AVG warning rather than removal…
Sure but that’s not the problem. It’s not the compression…it’s the TYPE of compression…it’s obviously triggering a match.
For what it’s worth, AVG gives a false positive “Runtime packed fsg” on a legit commercial copy of Alias Sketchbook Pro. Like malware authors, software developers sometimes compress their applications in order to prevent reverse-engineering. Seems to me like AVG is being a bit over-eager with the virus searching. Good reason to disable Resident Shield and all the other crap that comes with AVG Free, and just scan downloaded files manually.
It’s one of those things that starts to make you wonder if you care when you get it any more. Like the boy who cried wolf. Dunno. AVG still uses up less resources than Norton or Symmantec did at this point so I’m dealing with that bullshit until something better comes along. That’s how you build customer loyalty…just make something that’ll suffice until something better comes along and destroys your business.
I’m receiving “runtime packed fsg” message on several keygen programs that I have. I know these files are safe and thought it rather odd that AVG was declaring them as a threat. Unless, of course, AVG was just targeting keygen software. So I figured I’d google it just to see if this was the case and it isn’t. I don’t quite understand what all the fuss is about. One, I’m a long time AVG user and I’ve never got anywhere near as frustrated with it as I have been with Norton or McAfee. Two, I would be far more pissed off if AVG automatically removed my keygens. And lastly, the AVG home page issue… not sure what the deal was there but not once in the past 5 years have I ran into that one. Bitch’n site btw.
David,
I admit, despite my bitching, I’m happier with AVG than I was with Norton/Symantec. Their software grew bloated. Mind you, AVG has its bloat (I’ve got six processes running, one of which is the tray app) but it’s nowhere near the others. I can’t say I’ve used McAfee in a long time so no comment there.
As far as the runtime packged fsg error, so far it’s only cropped up in expendable files. Stuff I didn’t need anyway. Still, my main problem wasn’t that it was cropping up but that the alerts explained nothing. They didn’t even really tell you if we were talking about a serious threat or something that might have been more of a warning. Also, the option to remove it was a checkbox…with no submit button. Not giving me a whole lot of options. Just smacks of poor design (a.k.a. letting an engineer design something a UI expert should’ve).
> My suggestion to you is to find the offending file and delete it from your system.
Stupid advice FSG Packer (fast-small-good) is a legit compressed file, do not delete, just ignore your anti-virus warning. The file is not infected, only compressed.
Yuri and david is absolutely right… keygens and common program cracks are often packed in “fsg” format, everytime i run a v-scan i get 30-50 pop-ups about the damn thing… use your common sense, follow the filepath, if it a keygen, crack or the likes, it’s 99.8% safe.. just add to your exceptions, and relax…. dont you think your pc wouldve acted weird by now if it was a serious threat…
J. Twisttmann
I’ve gotten the picture in terms of the who compression format thing but no, I don’t agree that you can just use your common sense and suss out that the message is bullshit. Even if you’re talking about someone like you or me who can look and say, whatever, that’s bullshit, is it really? What if we’re talking about some worm or something that’s managed to implant itself in an existing file? It’s not unreasonable for someone to create a trojan that can dynamically grab a random file and swap itself or at the very least rename itself to match. And, these days, with hard disk capacities increasing for so little money (I’ve got two 1TB disks in my system that cost me less than $200) there are a lot of files to work with.
The real problem is that there are a lot of people out there who have no fucking clue. And, while I know you can’t cater to (and I really despite catering to) the lowest common denominator out there, you’ve got to at least provide clear options and solutions….that dialog does provide options that are fairly clear but it doesn’t provide a solution. Ignoring and Adding to Exceptions are solutions but not really…where’s the Remove option? Delete? Fix this fucking thing option?
After all, for other threats, you get the option to move to the vault or at least something to take care of it. To me, this is just some lazy engineering/design. Someone said, “What do we do with this class of warning?” “Just give them the usual dialog but only give them the ability to ignore/add to exceptions” “What the fuck?” “It’s just a warning, let them figure it out…”
My problem is that I’m tired of this sort of bullshit. I’m a programmer and I’ve worked for start-ups most of my career. I’ve seen this kind of crap over and over again. It’s something that slips through the cracks. My continuing problem is that no one at AVG gives a shit. Sure, if they were marketing their product for techheads who love proprietary and cryptic messages that only they can decipher, we’d be done here. But, they aren’t.
And, it’s not like I’m saying they can go fuck themselves…I’d rather their product beat out the likes of Symantec and McAfee. After all, is it really that hard to just throw up something that says explicitly “If you trust this file, you’re good as this is a common compression format” or at least just offer a “Remove/Move to Vault” button so the more security-minded who don’t know or trust the file can have the peace of mind that AVG is taking care of them? They’re spending all their time creating a “caching” system to speed up scans…which hasn’t sped them up at all for me. I think they can spend the time fixing this issue and making their product work as expected…