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EU gives conditional approval to Intel acquisition of McAfee

by Scott Bicheno on 26 January 2011, 18:28

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), European Commission

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Beware of the bundle

Back in the summer Intel announced it was hoping to acquire security software giant McAfee. Quite rightly, when one tech giant intends to acquire another, this drew the attention of competition authorities.

Half a year later the European Commission has found time in its busy schedule to approve the deal, subject to a couple of conditions being met.

The major concern of the Commission was that Intel might use its dominant position in the PC chip market to bundle McAfee with its chips, and thus prevent competition in the security software market.

The concessions Intel made to these concerns centre around it promising to ensure there will be no preferential treatment to McAfee in terms of the ‘functionalities' of Intel's CPUs and chipsets. Equally it won't hamper the running of McAfee on competitor's chips.

"The commitments submitted by Intel strike the right balance, as they allow preserving both competition and the beneficial effects of the merger. These changes will ensure that vigorous competition is maintained and that consumers get the best result in terms of price, choice and quality of the IT security products," said Commission VP Joaquín Almunia.

Clearly it would be anticompetitive for Intel to afford McAfee an advantage in running on its chips, but the issue of bundling doesn't seem to have been fully addressed here.

If future CPUs are sold with McAfee integrated into the silicon, and thus provide comprehensive anti-virus, firewall, etc, what reason would there be to buy another security product? You could argue this is already the case with Microsoft's free security suite, but it doesn't come pre-bundled to the best of our knowledge.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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Kinda agree, but then if AV solutions are incorporated into ucode, then it becomes a hardware solution rather than a software solution, no?
Exactly. If McAfee became bundled into the silicon, it's no longer McAfee as we know it.. it would be a totally new beast. And, incidentally, probably good for consumers, although I remain to be convinced by this hardware AV idea - surely with hardware AV, malicious code writers only have to find a single bug in the implementation and they can use it for the lifespan of the chip, given that it's hardware and can't be updated? Or am I just exposing my ignorance at how it might work?!
Yeah, information theory doesn't exactly support the notion of a HW AV. How is a CPU to know whether a piece of code is malicious or not? All instructions are equally valid, otherwise they wouldn't have been added, even looking at a handful of instructions in sequence doesn't exactly say “HEY IM A VIRUS YOU PROBABLY SHOULD'NT RUN ME!”, without some kind of database to pattern match against. Until there's more details on the methods involved, I'll remain sceptical.
Not at all sure what Intel is letting itself in for!

McAfee is probably my fave anti-nasties app but only because I see so many infected PCs come into my lab with McAfee supposedly protecting them - and that earns me money.

I disinfect these PCs (can be a lengthy business), install something that works (most usually Kaspersky Internet Security Suite - different versions of KISS on different Windows OSs) and grab a wad of money from the owners who are grateful to get back machines that now work normally - and better than they did when they bought them (I do a LOT of optimisations, too, of course).

I'm also reminded of this story I wrote a good while back when most of my time was spent on HEXUS.lifestyle:

Digital You or Digital Poo? McAfee's Mangled Museum Metaphors

Bob
Bob Crabtree;2038246
Digital You or Digital Poo? McAfee's Mangled Museum Metaphors
Well written, Bob, you should author more pieces, there's plenty more to rant about with modern IT, too. :D