In what is beginning to feel like something of a running joke, anti-virus company AVG apparently made an app for Windows that apparently does nothing but display ads, possibly track your location and ban the word “עברית,” which is Hebrew for Hebrew.
The app in question, AVG Security Suite, is supposed to be a virus scanner for the Windows 7 Phone platform. This brings up the obvious question, who would bother designing viruses for Windows 7 Phone? The answer, of course, is no one, which is why the app had a virtually non-existent search parameter.
Virtually non-existent, because website Within Windows captured a dump of the definitions database and found it contained only one word — עברית.
Since then, Microsoft has pulled the app from the market, although more because it can apparently track your location, supposedly so you can find a stolen phone (although that’s apparently something built into the phone itself) and not because of any weirdness with the search patterns.
As to the word, a little investigative work (also known as looking at the name of the guy who did the official blog post about the app on the company website) reveals that AVG’s chief technology officer is Yuval Ben-Itzhak, an Israeli with a degree from Ben-Gurion University in Israel. So, odds are he knows Hebrew. And it’s not as if Israel is known to be lacking in software engineers, which probably means it was a test word accidentally left in what was otherwise a completely useless app, or someone was trying to mess with their boss. Although probably the first.
Microsoft has since taken the app down.
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