[racket] Avast claims to find a virus in a Racket download from

Yesterday, John Chandler wrote:
> On a semi-public computer, I started a download of Racket, from the
> Univ. of Utah mirror, and partway through I got a popup, apparently
> from an anti-virus program called "Avast", which apparently lives on
> this computer.  The message in the popup is that a virus was found
> in the download.

That's not the first time that some AV is overzealous about what's
considered a virus, thought it could be that you have something on
your machine that affected the download.  (It's funny that I just had
some app update on the phone with the "what's new" text saying that
the avast mobile thing used to detect it as malware, and that was
fixed...)

In any case:

* I just checked that file, and it's identical to the one on the main
  server.  Also, the script that builds the web pages is doing some
  occasional verification that mirrored files are the same, and drops
  the link if it isn't.  (It just checks the size though.)

* I think that most of our mirrors are running on Linux or similar
  boxes, which means that they're extremely unlikely to be affected by
  windows viruses.  (They're also mostly servers, which means that
  there's not much user interaction on the actual machines.)

* You can also try one of the other mirrors, but if it's something on
  your machine or if (more likely) avast is throwing a false positive,
  then you'd get the same error.

* It will probably help if they have some way to report a file that is
  bogusly detected as a virus, and you do that with the executable
  that was reported.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!