Has Online Armor Firewall been discontinued?

nevertheless thew news told me that emsisoft decided to discontinue OA to push their own behavior blocker. maybe you consider your BB as enough it never could compare to OA in anything. maybe you pick some code from OA to implement but i dont think so. OA was a brilliant product since emsisoft bought it and also my experience told me that OA is going to die (there were too many examples for doing it this way - remember Symantec actions). i think too that it was a matter of time when OA (i forgot the author) would cooperate with some av vendor to improve its own detection. today it would have been bitdefender. OA would have been a serious killer for any other av-suite, in special Agnitums Outpost.

"cloud" - nice word for data mining. 2c

 

OA Premium verses free version. IIRC didn't the Premium version give you the capability to uninstall the
firewall portion and keep the HIPS portion ( for those who may use another firewall) while OA free didn't offer
that option?

 

Farewell Online Armor - you will be missed.

I have to admit, my only impression of OA is that it brought my footsteps to Emsisoft. I do not use HIPS in general.

I recommend that you check out AV-Comparatives' report on data transmission - Emsisoft is one of the products with the least data collection.

 

This is no surprise, I'm sorry for the hardcore users, personally I never liked the app.

 

Well there still is Eset Smart Security, Comodo's Defense+, Outpost Pro firewall, and as Mayahana recently pointed out, even Trustport has a configurable HIPS. The first three all score great in Matousec's leak tests. So I think there are plenty left to fill the gap.

 

I have this morning unistalled EIS, and installed OA on one of my snapshots, successfully...Just need to get a key for it. I have found that I purchased one for OA, which I believe was never activated, because I hadn't had OA installed on my system since 2007/2008.

Spoiler: screenshot

 

@ Tarnak,
Overcrowded taskbar....
Less is more, imo.

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@ Christian,

And the discussion for a discontinued product goes on.....

* I know, starting dates noted.

 

It's what I meant in my last post.

 

What is a HIPS? The technology behind Emsisoft Online Armor Firewall explained
July 10, 2012
http://blog.emsisoft.com/2012/07/10/tec120710/

 

A hundred years ago, companies discontinued horse trailers in favor for petrol based machines... Why stick to some outdated technology while the world around progresses? It's a matter of fact that behavior blocking does a far better job in protecting computers and is a next step in protection software evolution. This isn't a marketing question at all, it's a protection question only.

 

I am running OA, but everytime I load a page tab in Opera 12.15, OA advanced mode shows these balloon popups....When I switch back to OA standard mode, they no longer show.

Surely, if I want to run OA in advanced mode, then I should be able to prevent these balloon popups from showing for the browser.

Spoiler: screenshot

 

Then it will be very easy for you to prove this statement. Can you?

 

The best proof overall is the false-positives argument. A HIPS with its thousands of alerts trains the user to blindly click everything away, leading in an overall less secure situation. For non-expert users a HIPS suggests safety that doesn't exist if the user is not up to use it correctly. Efficient use of a HIPS requires advanced computer knowledge, which can't be expected for the vast majority of people out there. That is a quite strong implicit proof that Behavior Blocking is objectively seen better than HIPS, as it shows only alerts with a near-100% certainty that it's malware. I have no doubt that you will find corner cases that proof otherwise. Though I'm talking about typical users (who we intend to sell our software to).

 

Yeah, I can agree with your last post, but it's not a matter of fact that "behavior blocking does a far better job in protecting computers". For me, it's exactly the opposite. And I'm not an expert, just love to play with security software.

 

Well, my statement was based on quite a few years of experience selling both HIPS and Behavior Blockers to some thousands of people. Customer feedback clearly shows that the majority of users can't really handle HIPS and therefore have a worse overall protection level than when using a Behavior Blocker. Today I'd see HIPS more as a 'tool' that helps experts to get aware of certain things that happen on the system. Just like a Task Manager that helps you view what programs are running. But I wouldn't consider a HIPS an effective protection solution per se, without knowing the user's level of knowledge. Yes, it can be very powerful if the right person is in front of the screen, but it can also lead to the exact opposite of what it intends when in wrong hands.

 

Blimey there's a lot of sentimental people on this forum.
I have every faith in @emsisoft and team for future projects, and above all providing protection.
Let's all look forward now and stop reminiscing.

 

It's not sentimentalism. Emsisoft owns Online Armor, so it has the right to discontinue it. No one here doubt this. They work to sell and to gain ( post n. 113 here ), it's perfectly legitimate ! Likewise legitimate is that many here believe that HIPS give a better protection, or the same but in a way that they like better (they can monitor continually the system, know what happens, which services, processes, programs work, set the system and every single application.... ).... So it's not sentimentalism to regret that another excellent security program died. The last post of emsisoft say clearly that BB give better protection at the common users that don't know what they have to do and prefer that the security program choose for them. This is, I believe, the point of this thread.

 

OA will be killed, but I didn't want to kill this thread !

 

I just installed a new SSD along with windows 8.1 and all my programs. When I was looking for a fresh copy of OA I was sad to see it had been discontinued. I've been running it since Mike was pimping it at CastleCops when they had the big giveaway. I remember being happy when I won a copy as it was going to be my first real HIPS program.

I guess I'll continue to run it for as long as I can. I mainly use it to give me a heads up if something weird starts to run and/or calls home. I've run this setup with a handful of AV's for so long I would feel lost without it .

 

That's why white listing should be used with HIPS. White listing keeps the user from having to answer many unnecessary alerts. Your company has the best white listing with any HIPS that has ever been on the market. I rarely ever had to answer any alerts at all with OA. I might receive 3 alerts in a four day period. Most of the time it would be Adobe flash updating. Several other users here at Wilders has informed me they receive very few alerts with OA as well. I have not used your Behavior Blocker in about 3 years, but I always got at least 5 times as many alerts with it in the past. I don't know what percent of users get many alerts, and what percent get few but all users definitely don't get a lot of alerts with OA.

 

Yes, a HIPS that alerts about every possible dangerous action is of course better for expert users, it's also about having total control for us geeks. And the last time I tested Mamutu I was not impressed at all. But I'm sure that the BB has been improved a lot.

 

Would it not be possible for OA users to continue using the pure firewall on its own without the cloud updates etc...?

I mean how often does the windows firewall receive an "update."..?

 

Would it be possible, yes. It would require many hours of coding to remove the cloud, licensing feature, etc.. Emsisoft has already stated they have no intentions of releasing OA as freeware, or under any other condition. It would not make sense from a business point of view. It would cost them a lot of money in order to make the changes.