Some clunky bits can frustrate, but Norton 360 package generally works well

AUCKLAND: If you’re old enough to remember PCs, the name Peter Norton will be familiar to you.

In the 1980s, Mr Norton developed muchneeded utilities for PCs.

Never as wildly exuberant as his bath saltsinspired antivirus contemporary John McAfee, Mr Norton is 76 now. Symantec, which bought his company ages ago, no longer uses him as a model for the internetdelivered security software it markets.

Security software has to deal with a much more complex threat environment now, and Symantec’s Norton 360 Premium suite comes loaded with features aimed at keeping you safe online.

Being a curious sort, I installed Norton on a Mac laptop to start with. Symantec says it should work, and it does. Sort of.

You miss out on some features like the handy 125gb of cloud backup on macOS and iOS that are available on Windows and Android.

While I was figuring out what works on which platform, Norton 360 suggested it’s possible to ‘‘extend your protection by Installing Norton on other PC, Mac, Android and iOS devices’’ with a download link or a QR code. Sounds easy, but it doesn’t actually work on Apple devices.

When I clicked on the link

Norton displays, my iPad downloaded a setup.zip compressed file which I’d have thought was a nono for a security vendor.

Installing the Norton Mobile Security app from the App Store works, but it only runs in portrait mode on the iPad.

On Android, the download link after a few system error messages told you to head to the Google Play app store to download Norton, but a certificate error put paid to that. No worries, I can go to the app stores and get Norton from there but this wasn’t a great start.

Back on the Mac, Norton 360 also comes with an easy to use virtual private network (VPN) client to tunnel your traffic when you’re connected to untrusted networks.

The Safe Web Plus plugin for popular web browsers was a pain to configure, requiring you to log in again each time you wanted to change things.

Note you can’t change the VPN endpoint so that it looks like you’re in North America, for instance.

I really wanted to sanitise my email stores with Norton 360, which has a fast scanner that scores very well in independent malware detection tests. That didn’t pan out. Norton 360 doesn’t integrate with Apple Mail and current versions of macOS won’t let thirdparty apps into the mail folders. That’s a good security feature, ironically enough.

Norton 360 quirks apart, operating systems are moving towards lockeddown environments like iOS and Windows 10 S with restrictions on what users and software can access.

Symantec will disagree but in such an environment, there’s no need for thirdparty security software for the vast majority of people.