Ugh, no. I will not be participating in an arms race against advertisements. Either a site yields to my use of an ad blocker or they lose my traffic entirely. End of story.
> Ugh, no. I will not be participating in an arms race against advertisements.
Nobody's forcing you to submit patches just for enabling them. But browse as you like, it's your computer; that's one of the main arguments in favor of ad blocking anyway.
Maybe because it's a popular topic and many readers may assume it's linked. Of course it's also possible the author just wants to dramatize this event.
I use Kaspersky, and am starting to regret it. The worst part is the newest version has some great features (built in VPN is pretty easy to use), but I simply dont trust the software anymore. I've heard that simply uninstalling it still leaves some processes running, so i guess i will make the move when i buy a new laptop...
> I don't understand why people even bother with additional anti-virus for Windows nowadays.
Old habits die hard. Especially among non-tech-savvy people, who in the past were told so many times that antivirus is essential because Windows is easy to infect, that it's hard now to explain to them that the built-in Windows Defender is good enough.
You don't have to be using shady software.. All you have to do is browse the internet.
As long as code execution vulnerabilities in web browsers and common plugins (adobe, etc.) exist.. and they still do, 'drive-by downloading' will continue to spread malware, adware, and ransomware.
I don't see how non-professional can browse the net with JS blocker on. Most of the sites nowdays just won't work and average user won't have any way to figure out why.
Windows Defender misses a lot of malware and drive by toolbar installs. I bought licenses of ESET Smart Security for everyone in my immediate family about 3 years ago. They were on Windows Defender before. The number of calls about "my internet isn't working" has dropped to 0 since I rolled out ESET.
Given that everyone lives on a browser and the most outside of that they usually need is a browser, a dedicated media player and a PDF reader, I installed them Linux and cut tech support down to a single call so far: A 5 year old install that needed an upgrade to support a 3G modem.
a. Troyans aka "Letter from IRS" promising to jail you unless you open it. Yes, a lot of people still fall for that.
b. Browser vulns if you didn't update your browser and visit some weird sites.
c. Plugin vulns such as flash/java - a lot of content, esp. video, still requires flash.
Though I think most cybercrime moved on from old-fashioned viruses to botnets and ransomware (not strictly correct since I'm mixing delivery and monetization here but I hope you get what I mean), since you can make much more money with it. And given the frequency I read about those in the media, they are not rare at all.
Windows Defender has been shown time and time again in comparatives to be not much better than nothing. Its only plus point was it's low resource requirement.
I may be wrong, but I can't find any info as to their sponsors other than universities and volunteer researchers.
And I'm not sure how that addresses what I said about Defender being borderline useless, because they come up short across most tests from what I remember.
Unless it has drastically improved in the last year.
I think AV Comparatives are independent -- at least they were when I last had to read up on all this several years ago.
At the time (2010ish), they even had a few reports where they showed that pretty much all the AV products were quite bad. Either they failed to detect a large portion of real malware, and/or they were a huge drain on the system's resources.
> Either they failed to detect a large portion of real malware, and/or they were a huge drain on the system's resources.
Those aren't mutually exclusive... ;-) Some things never change, I guess.
As a Windows admin who uses Unix-ish systems exclusively at home, I am a little clueless sometimes. When using AV software on our computers, I can at least point to that and say I did what I could (be reasonably expected to do), but whenever I read what people who really know about IT security have to say about the AV industry, I get the feeling it's all just a bunch of charlatans and snake oil peddlers.
But the latter is a little difficult to explain to my boss without sounding like a tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic.
The point I'm making is, Defender is no better than these AV companies as it fails detection tests just as much as they do, if not more.
romanovcode implied that because AV tests are frequently sponsored by AV companies, that would somehow negate Defender's consistently poor results (which would make no sense, as it has poor results pretty much universally across different tests).
From my tech support days it seemed like every antivirus or firewall software I encountered had its own unique uninstallation software that you had to download separately if you wanted to completely wipe it off your machine. I don't understand why their standard uninstalls don't do this in the first place.
Standard installers are usually written using some sort of toolkit which usually has limited APIs. It could be that the antivirus does things that these APIs can not revert (just guessing).
The same goes for me. From one side, Kaspersky is a reputable and established AV company, from another side it has too tight ties with FSB. Sorry, no trust anymore.
The meddling in the elections in the US the Russians are being accused of has nothing to do with the actual election systems. It's related to impacting the public perception of a candidate by releasing dirt on one at opportune times.
It is funny that the ones accusing Russia are the same who were in Maidan Square, haranguing the crowds to revolt against Yanukovich ( the democratically elected president ). So meddling is good in one direction and wrong in the other?
Are you claiming members of US Congress and CIA and FBI and so on were literally on Maidan Square haranguing the crowds? If they were, they certainly managed to avoid being detected and recognized by anybody but you.
Or, more likely, to counter one propaganda you are just parroting another piece of propaganda.
Or, more likely, both things are true (you know what he meant when he said "the ones") because intelligence agencies of superpowers are constantly trying to influence geopolitics in their government's favor.
"because" here is completely wrong. From the fact that intelligence agencies of superpowers, in general, try to influence geopolitics, in general, does not follow in no manner that specific people performed specific actions at specific place.
True, one does not imply the other, so "because" is wrong. I meant to say that "Russia (presumably) retaliated because the US does it too."
Geopolitical inevitabilities aside, though, there is plenty of evidence for both the US and Russian governments' manipulations of other countries' elections.
It can't be zero trust relationship - if you pay taxes and elect representatives, you trust they will not just do whatever they like with it and ignore you but do at least something useful to you. Of course, I would agree that people in general place way too much trust in government right now and that's why it was allowed to grow to current metastatic sizes and become so dangerous. But it does not mean it can function with zero trust - some trust is necessary, just not too much of it.
Doesn't matter if they can influence voters with enough "fake news" and document dumps from selectively hacked politicians. Social engineering is always the weakest link.
And here a translation of the Russia newspaper that first covered the arrest: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...