This is an old revision of the document!
The Windows installer for POPFile and several of the Windows utilities shipped with POPFile are built using NSIS, the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System. NSIS was SourceForge “Project of the Month” for January 2006 (POPFile was “Project of the Month” for May 2003).
Since the beginning of August 2004 several anti-virus packages have been falsely reporting that software built using NSIS contains a trojan, or other form of virus. The following statement appeared on the old NSIS web site but it was not copied to their new Wiki-based web site:
Usually an updated set of virus definitions stops the false reports (e.g. Symantec's definitions dated 9 August 2004 detected a trojan in the NSIS “internet downloading” plug-in but their definitions dated 10 August (or later) do not).
In addition to the Windows installer for POPFile, the following utilities shipped with the Windows version of POPFile are built using NSIS and contain the “internet downloading” plug-in mentioned above:
However in these four programs this plug-in is not used to access the internet - it is used to shutdown POPFile without using your browser.
The following optional Windows utility for POPFile uses the NSIS “internet downloading” plug-in to access the internet:
The addssl.exe program downloads some SSL components from the University of Winnipeg repository (these files are required to allow POPFile to use SSL connections to mail servers).
If you are still concerned then you can get a second opinion at http://www.virustotal.com/ which will scan a suspect file for you using over 30 different up-to-date anti-virus packages.
The NSIS wiki has a page about False Positives and this includes a list of online virus scanners
See also:
Should you find anything in the documentation that is incomplete, unclear, outdated or just plain wrong, please let us know and leave a note in the Documentation Forum.