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Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

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Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#241
post #239
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we want to live in a world where someone running something different than everyone else on their computer is treated with suspicion? This seems like a very slippery slope towards the iPhonization of the PC.

> Do we want to live in a world where someone running something different than everyone else on their computer is treated with suspicion? It depends on what you mean by "suspicion". Should users be wary and not blindly run uncommon binaries they got off the internet, on a unsandboxed system? I don't see why not. I'll even say that most developers are not exercising enough caution when downloading random packages off…

Isn't this already what Windows does? It's warned about unsigned binaries on first run for a while now, no?

And I can see some argument for that, even if in practice it feels more like teaching users to blindly ignore warnings.

But holding uncommon or un-Microsoft-sourced (that is, signed) to a higher standard feels wrong.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. By that logic, what are firefighters doing but censoring homes? What are koalas but a form of eucalyptus censorship? What is locking your front door but a form of censoring burglars? No, just no. Censorship is preventing the transmission of ideas , nothing more, nothing less. Deleting a file has nothing to do with transmission, and it's being done in response to a perceived threat, not its commun…

You can't transmit what you don't have. Also, fwiw "transmission" is literally the name of torrenting software. Would your argument change if that was the package being removed instead of qbittorrent? Most people use windows, windows comes with defender on by default, what's stopping the govt/some company from getting msft to remove programs and files they don't like?

> what's stopping the govt/some company from getting msft to remove programs and files they don't like?

Literally the capitalistic profit motive?

You know, companies generally try to avoid pissing off their customers and driving them to competitors for no good reason. If Microsoft started politically censoring users' content, that's probably the easiest thing they could do to send users away from Windows and Office over to Macs and Google Docs en masse.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * "Linux doesn't support Photoshop / MS Excel / Altium / SolidWorks" "You don't need those things anyway, Krita / LibreOffice Calc / etc are good enough. Alternatively, don't they run in Wine?" > * "Microsoft's fanatical devotion to binary backwards-compatibility means I don't have to worry old software will break because I've got the wrong version of python installed, or my version of libreadline is too new." "Peo…

> to argue that your opinion is wrong But this is not arguing that the opinion is wrong. It just shows that it's not a universal true for everyone and that Linux could work for other people reading this.

But the whole point of what I'm saying is that I personally use Windows for my own personal reasons. Why is it my job to provide a platform for some Linux Desktop evangelist to promote their favorite OS by arguing against my reasoning?

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to argue that your opinion is wrong But this is not arguing that the opinion is wrong. It just shows that it's not a universal true for everyone and that Linux could work for other people reading this.

But the whole point of what I'm saying is that I personally use Windows for my own personal reasons. Why is it my job to provide a platform for some Linux Desktop evangelist to promote their favorite OS by arguing against my reasoning?

HN is not the place for dry posts like "I love Windows/Linux". Nobody cares that you run Windows for "your personal" reasons. People are actually interested in the reasons.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure their is: Windows is a better fit for the things I do with a computer. Edit: I know right? How dare I express a preference for Windows. Downvote me to hell because I don't like using your favored OS.

for the most part, HN is pretty squarely in the 'windows bad linux good' camp. It is dumb af since according to a lot of the users on here, linux is gods gift to humanity. doesn't matter that pretty much all software is a dumpster fire, and linux is just another, less hot dumpster fire compared to windows.

The difference between Linux and Windows is that in Linux I have never encountered any problem that I could not solve, in the worst case, when all else failed, by reading many source files of the offending programs, while on Windows I have encountered many cases of unsolvable problems, for which not only I was unable to find a solution (even if I have a lot of professional experience with all Windows versions since 3.0 till present) but also nobody else from IT support.

Just to give a recent example, 3 different IT support people, from 3 different countries, have worked one day each, trying to discover why MS Teams does not work on a certain new Dell laptop, while it works fine if you move the Ethernet cable to the old laptop. After many efforts, nobody has any clue.

Such things cannot happen on Linux.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#246
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ditched in the middle of Windows 7, with absolutely no regrets. Valve has made tremendous inroads in gaming with Proton, along with developers releasing for Linux, there really isn't a good excuse to stay with Microsoft.

> there really isn’t a good excuse to stay with Microsoft Except, if you run nvidia optimus laptop and have mixed display DPI. Every few months I try to run Arch on my recent laptop and it’s always a nightmare. I was hyped that 470 driver would fix wayland in nvidia (the only half decent way to fix mixed DPIs on Linux). Lo and behold, It’s still a buggy mess that made me crawl back to windows. Maybe on 570 I will be…

> mixed display DPI.

I believe Wayland may be better than X with this, but my displays have the same DPI so I haven't tested myself. My displays do have different refresh rates and Wayland handles that better in my experience.

NVIDIA has been slow on the Wayland front though, but I think they may have made decent progress with recent driver releases.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#247
post #241
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we want to live in a world where someone running something different than everyone else on their computer is treated with suspicion? It depends on what you mean by "suspicion". Should users be wary and not blindly run uncommon binaries they got off the internet, on a unsandboxed system? I don't see why not. I'll even say that most developers are not exercising enough caution when downloading random packages off…

Isn't this already what Windows does? It's warned about unsigned binaries on first run for a while now, no? And I can see some argument for that, even if in practice it feels more like teaching users to blindly ignore warnings. But holding uncommon or un-Microsoft-sourced (that is, signed) to a higher standard feels wrong.

> Isn't this already what Windows does? It's warned about unsigned binaries on first run for a while now, no?

Sort of? There's three I know of

1. the generic warning for files you downloaded off the internet

2. the UAC warning when you try to run any program as admin

3. the smartscreen warning for uncommon files.

The first two has the "run/open" equally as visible as the "don't run/cancel" button. The last one is the one where the "run" button is hidden.

>And I can see some argument for that, even if in practice it feels more like teaching users to blindly ignore warnings.

That's exactly the problem. The first two warnings show up for everything, so users are trained to click through.

>But holding uncommon or un-Microsoft-sourced (that is, signed) to a higher standard feels wrong.

The problem is that without a digital signature, you can't tell whether a binary from a legitimate developer and a malware developer. Hence the need to rely on file hashes and needing to warn users for uncommon binaries.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#248
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you watch youtube videos with hardware acceleration yet?

Facetious question but for a genuine response: Firefox yes, your distro's Chromium package yes, but Chrome proper is still refusing to enable it though (they allowed you to toggle it for a bit after 88 the retracted that in 91).

Not being facetious at all. I'm replying to "there really isn't a good excuse to stay with Microsoft." and last I checked browser video acceleration on linux with nvidia was still broken, no matter whose fault that is.

I'd love to use linux but It's hard to say everyone should use linux when in 2021 not everyone even has proper video acceleration.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#249
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wonder if the MAFIAA can pressure software vendors to ban classes of software. What if the vendor just says "no"? Who's going to win in the court of public opinion when this hits the press? Besides, they don't seem to care that much, considering that very few people actually watch videos on their computers anymore. In case they do, it's through a browser which sandbox (at least on firefox) the decryption modules t…

The "court of public opinion" didn't prevented walled gardens on the mobile world. People wouldn't stop watching BigStudio if they didn't offer their service for a TV vendor, people would just buy from the vendor who bowed to the imposed conditions. In Brazil, there's nothing legally preventing you from recording OTA TV but no big name TV vendor add a unencrypted record feature. You can find it on cheap digital decod…

>The "court of public opinion" didn't prevented walled gardens on the mobile world

That's more like megacorp vs consumers, not megacorp vs megacorp. Trying to force vendors to remove piracy apps would be closer to the latter. As a concrete example, apple's app tracking transparency seem so be doing pretty well.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are holding far too strict a definition of the word related to "transmission". If I am prevented from reading data I want to read, because some entity has decided they don't want me to read it, how is that not censorship? Also, where are you even getting that defintion anyway? Looking up nearly every form of the word 'censor' I can think of, nothing speaks specifically to the transmission of ideas. Rather…

> If I am prevented from reading data I want to read... how is that not censorship? Of course it's censorship, they're preventing it from being transmitted to you. That's what I said. > Also, where are you even getting that defintion anyway? Literally the first sentence of the Wikipedia article [1]: "Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information." Speech and communication are tra…

Oxford Languages defines censorship as "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."

Mirriam-Webster defines a censor as "a person who supervises conduct and morals," adding a subdefinition as "an official who examines materials (such as publications or films) for objectionable matter." The relevant definition for "censorship" simply points at the word "censor," so it was not useful for my argument.

In any case, I think wiki is not 100% right according to the actual language authorities. MS deliberately categorizes otherwise-harmless piracy-related software as deletion-worthy, and that isn't censorship? When they clearly have a conflict of interest in that some of that software represents a direct threat to their revenue stream? C'mon dude.

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