As @majorbuzz says, release 25.4 has still not fixed the UDP (17) Security History issue. With each update since the issue was first reported (25.2, 25.3 and now 25.4) I have tried re-enabling netbios in the network adapter WINS settings and each time the Security History has immediately been swamped with multiple UDP (17) reports. So I continued to run with netbios disabled. It seems that nothing is getting fixed in the updates.
Other new annoyances have appeared with the newer versions. One is Norton telling me my network is compromised each time I boot up, simply because I my have network set to Private rather than Public. It needs to be Private so I can discover other devices on the local network.
Another is the 30 day report appearing not every 30 days but every day. The content of that report is rubbish. I run a Quick Scan at 1800 every day so the count of Quick Scans reported should always be 30. But I’ve seen figures anywhere between 7 and 30 - it’s currently saying 28. Also says I’ve run 0 scheduled scans. How is that so when the Quick Scans it’s reported are scheduled, as Quick Scan no longer runs automatically as it did with v22, and I also have a Full Scan scheduled to run every Sunday. The nonsense is completed by the report then having a warning saying “No scans have been run in the past 30 days”. It’s all total junk.
A further linked annoyance is that the Norton Safe Web browser extension no longer adds the safety markers to results on search engines (Google, Bing, etc), only on Norton Safe Search. That’s not a bug, it’s a deliberate move to promote use of Safe Search.
Much earlier in this thread (post #145), @Soulasylum made the point that Norton are very unlikely to reintroduce the levels of control of the Norton product that users had up to v22. I think it’s also the case that information offered to users is never going to match what was available in v22 and earlier. The Security History entries are now pretty skeletal. For example, Live Update security history no longer indicates which definitions have been updated, just that the update was successful. Similarly, up to v22, the scan result entries gave a breakdown of files, registry items, start up items, etc that had been scanned and counts of trusted files that had been skipped - now it’s just folders and files.
For me the biggest loss is that there is no longer a Background Tasks sub-menu under Admin settings. I’ve had a support case running with Norton level 2 support since June of last year. that started after I saw in v22’s Background Tasks screen that Product Maintenance was always failing to complete. I found that was because there were problems accessing the stats.norton.com server. With the help of my ISP, I found that was due to stats.norton.com now being hosted by Microsoft Azure cloud services, with access to the Azure endpoints controlled by Azure Traffic Manager, and that the Traffic Manager nameservers did not refresh downstream DNS servers correctly if accessed via IPv6. (The full details are in this thread that I started last August: Stats.norton.com DNS/nameserver IPv6 issue)
Despite me urging Norton support to raise a case with Traffic Manager support multiple times, they have refused to do so, saying on one occasion “Norton engineers do not involve third party engineers in fixing problems.” Why - when this issue is caused by the third party, not by Norton?
After one of the recent Norton updates, I received an email from support asking if that had resolved the issue. That raises two questions:
- How the hell could it when the issue is not due to the Norton product - it’s due Traffic Manager nameservers.
- How could I tell as there is no longer a Background Tasks screen where I can check what tasks are running correctly. (Earlier versions had a file - DiStrPtr.dat - in Norton’s ProgramData that grew significantly in size if Product Maintenance was not completing correctly but that file no longer exists in v24 and v25.)
That prompts two further questions: does the Norton product still have a Product Maintenance task and, if so, does it still need to access stats.norton.com. There’s no easy way of knowing.
Several contributors to this thread have said that they have cancelled, or are considering cancelling, their Norton subscriptions. I’m beginning to think the same way. Not sure what the subscription costs are elsewhere in the world but here in the UK it’s around 80 pounds sterling per year (about 105 US dollars). That was reasonable for the excellent product that Norton was up to and including v22. But I’m not convinced it’s worth paying that for the current heap of junk that Norton has become.