Neowin has a couple of screen shots of a Microsoft antivirus product, that has been spoken about as code name Morro, for quite some time. The product will be named Security Essentials, presumably to be included with the other ‘essentials’ that Microsoft allows to be downloaded, rather than includes with any operating system.

This does two things. It makes the legal problems and challenges from competitors go away, because the products are not bundled, and lowers any expectations, because the products are free.

According to the leaked information (did this leak accompany yet another build of Windows 7?), the trials of this product started June 1 and should be available by September.

Certainly the sheeple will applaud this effort, as they are too lazy to check the many free offerings from companies whose purpose is to combat the digital nastiness, and glean the fact that a couple of gems are actually in the mix.

As one of the responders at Neowin wondered, will the updates to this product be as sporadic as the updates to Windows Defender? As someone who laughs when updates come across for Windows Defender, I think it should be subtitled, ‘if we feel like it‘.

UPDATE – Mary-Jo Foley from ZDNet, states that the beta of Security Essentials disables Windows Defender completely. I tend to wonder why this new utility was not folded into Windows Defender.

Since virus attacks are many times more prevalent than other malware, one would hope this would not be so – besides, with daily updates, Microsoft could check on your machine’s condition almost, if not, daily. Norton, McAfee, and others will certainly be upping their offerings, perhaps only cosmetically changing things, but there will be change – to give the appearance of newness and improvement.

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I am not a virus!

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