The only tests against real malware out there I've seen are done by AV-Test and AV-Comparatives, and the top products are pretty good at blocking them. Calling them useless sounds more like your hopes than facts, like calling seatbelts useless because people die in car accidents.
Uninstalling Flash, Adobe reader, Office and JRE, and using Chrome with adblock also helps you enormously, but is still a far cry for any user having difficulties with finding the download-button from sourceforge.
Getting a signing cert is easy as just buying one from Honest Achmed's Used Cars and Certificates, so the only real use for signed software with malware protection is to manually maintain your own list of trusted signers.
Uninstalling Flash, Adobe reader, Office and JRE, and using Chrome with adblock also helps you enormously, but is still a far cry for any user having difficulties with finding the download-button from sourceforge.
Getting a signing cert is easy as just buying one from Honest Achmed's Used Cars and Certificates, so the only real use for signed software with malware protection is to manually maintain your own list of trusted signers.