John Norstad Retires Disinfectant -- John Norstad announced last week that he has retired Disinfectant, his free anti-virus utility. John considered updating the utility to combat the recently discovered Autostart-9805 worm (see "Autostart Worm Breaks Malware Silence" in TidBITS-428) but decided to direct his software's loyal users to commercial utilities such as Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, Virex, or Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh. His announcement said, "I made this decision not because of the new Autostart-9805 worm, but rather because of the widespread and dangerous Microsoft macro virus problem." (See TidBITS's article series on macro viruses.) He felt that Disinfectant had been inadequate protection for some time, and continuing to update it would unfairly give users a false sense of security. John began work on Disinfectant in the spring of 1988, and Northwestern University released the first version to the public in March of 1989. [MHA]

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