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From the Unofficial Apple Weblog

If you've been by www.mac.com lately, you may have noticed that all the Virex links are gone. MacFixIt today is reporting that Apple has in fact decided to drop Virex support because of ongoing Tiger compatibility issues; current Panther users can download updated virus defs through the end of the month. This is extremely unfortunate for a number of reasons. First of all, Virex through .Mac was a steal: a .Mac subscription was less than half the cost of a stand-alone MacAfee 5 seat license, the cheapest license they offer. More importantly, making virus protection easily available benefits everyone, not just the people who have it installed, by slowing down the spread of viruses.

There's no word yet on what, if anything, will replace Virex in the .Mac stable, but I certainly hope something does, and quickly. For Apple's sake, I hope they find something to add value to the service, because it's going to be hard to justify the price for a glorified webdav server, since they don't offer connectivity and most people have web an email services through their ISPs. It's also irresponsible, I think, to offer on-line data services, high volume email, and folder sharing without offering virus protection. If nothing else, I hope the put up some decent how-to article for free alternatives.