Now that Augmentor is available publicly, I want to address the issue of antivirus false positives. False positives are warnings from antivirus tools that flag a program as malicious when in fact it is not. These occur because antivirus tools commonly employ complex "guessing" algorithms to analyze and determine if a program might be malicious. These algorithms can make guesses that are accurate (detecting actual malicious code) or inaccurate (a false positive).
Here is a VirusTotal report for the Augmentor 0.5.0 Beta:
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/14a44ce72b37564b7f37a468007e4784f6d8c919f629...
The report shows 8 detections out of 71 security software scans. Sometimes, scan results will show indications that warnings are the result of algorithmic guesses. In this report you can see tags like "Suspicious", "BehavesLike", and "[PUP]", (which means Potentially Unwanted Program). Searching these terms will reveal information that such results can often be false positives rather than definitive warnings for known malware. The VirusTotal docs also include a helpful note on this subject: https://docs.virustotal.com/docs/false-positive-contacts
Augmentor's features depend on techniques such as process, window, and input monitoring. Without these, it does not know when Affinity is active and can't draw the tab highlight or allow the right mouse button to prevent tab detachment when dragging. While such features are perfectly legitimate and helpful, it is understandable why security software might consider the base techniques as suspicious, since a bad actor might use similar techniques for ill purposes.
Augmentor does not contain any malicious code. It is designed to do exactly what it advertises, and I use it myself almost daily. If you have received antivirus warnings I apologize for the hassle. I will be submitting false positive reports to AV vendors as able. Unfortunately, past experience with such reports resulted in no changes to security warnings. If you are not comfortable using Augmentor for any reason, I completely respect that decision. I will not ask a customer to ignore their personal concerns or reservations. Please share any questions you have and I will do my best to answer them.
Thank you to everyone who engages with this project. I hope that Augmentor is or will be a useful companion on your Affinity journey!
