That opinion doesn't change the fact that something has changed in behavior here in 20.0.84, but I certainly get the sense that there is no interest in pursuing.
Modern security software works on more than just signatures. They use heuristics to try to "guess" if a particular application is "bad" or not.
Security companies also
will not provide the details of their heuristic algorithms, so that companies like JRiver can make sure they avoid them. In fact, these details are closely guarded intellectual property of the security software vendors.
JRiver can't do anything about it. We can speculate on what may have caused ZoneAlarm to decide to freak out. But it is all guesses. Every single build changes the signature of the installer, and anything could be tripping it up. They might fix it with some future "signature" update. Most likely, their heuristics is just guessing poorly, because it is a "dumb" computer program trying to guess something very, very hard for even trained security experts to figure out. Vendors add exceptions for applications all the time! Microsoft Word would not run with basically any modern security suite at all, if they didn't build in special "exceptions" for Word (and so on and so forth). But, JRiver is small, so the only way ZoneAlarm's vendors will know it is an issue is if you complain to them.
And, I'll add, that I agree that most modern security suites are huge, troublesome, piles of junk that slow down your computer and largely don't provide much more security for all the irritation they cause. I don't use ZoneAlarm, so I can't speak in particular about it (I lost all respect for CheckPoint and stopped using their products when
they did the scareware thing a few years back). But, if you want to keep using it, you'll need to figure out how to (a) add your own exception to the application to let it run, or (b) complain until they fix it.
