Microsoft Anti-Spyware Preview and Discussion of how it compares to SpyBot & Ad-Aware & why it's better

Paul Thurrot has posted an article which includes comments following an "interview with Giant co-founder Andrew Newman just days before his company was purchased by Microsoft".

The article is well worth a read - here are a couple of excerpts:

"We decided to leverage the power of community and create an anti-spam community," he said. "Many products are like that now, including Cloudmark and others. But there wasn't anything like that four years ago. We allow the Internet community to help us solve a huge problem, and we build into that system an intelligent approach to anti-spam that combines [traditional anti-spam] rules with heuristics."

"Indeed, the signature-based methods used to combat spam are ineffective against spyware, because the methods spyware use to attack your system change so often. Newman said Giant AntiSpyware provides a three-pronged attack on spyware. First, the product can perform spyware scanning and cleaning, as you'd expect. Second, the aforementioned Spynet provides Giant with valuable community contributions. And third, Giant AntiSpyware runs constantly in your system, providing real-time protection from spyware, preventing it from getting a foothold in your system. It's better to prevent an attack from happening than to try and remove malware after it's already infested your system."