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Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

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Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#281
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anticipated this question :) No, it was just a plain Windows form, built from scratch using a then-popular Windows IDE. I think it was mostly triggered by the file name, maybe in combination with some crypto code inside.

> using a then-popular Windows IDE If you're referring to Delphi, this has been a common issue for a long time. Delphi seems to have been very popular with malware writers, and so AV companies keep flagging stuff from the standard libraries as malware. Got so bad at one time that some tried to get a deal with the major AV players to provide a suite of very basic Delphi applications they could use for false-positive t…

NSIS installers used to get flagged as malware occasionally, too. Was very frustrating for distributing software.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#282
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting ideas here: how antivirus becomes a form of censorship. Maybe that’s an extreme view but it feels like now that Microsoft supplies it’s own defender app. And like all forms of martial law beginning as a way to protect citizens! I also noticed that with win10 when apps crash it sends the data to Microsoft—as though they can fix 3rd party apps for us. Yeesh. I think I’ll skip out on Windows 11 TYVM.

People are downvoting the above comment for some reason, but what is this Windows Defender behavior if not a form of censorship?

That's sort of like arguing a hotdog is a sandwich. It isn't simply because if someone asked for a sandwich and you gave them a hotdog they'd say you gave them the wrong thing—even though technically a sandwich can simply be meat between some bread.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#283
post #28

I recently unpacked an old archive from the time I was making some shareware few decades ago. Windows Defender instantly ate all keygen.exe files from it. Those keygens were my own keygens for my own software (I wrote them myself and used them to generate keys for my customers back in the day).

In the Windows defender settings, I believe under history actions or something similar (I don't have a PC running defender at hand) you can release and whitelist files it has placed in quarantine.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#284
post #275
post #93

I like how defender has been a daily thing on HN for the last week. If you want to turn this shit completely off (or actually remove it), you just need to find a way to elevate a prompt as TrustedInstaller. This is the magic spell required to carry out extremely dangerous actions, such as 'net stop windefend', or otherwise adjusting permissions so the local administrator is allowed to do administrative things again.…

I don't think those controls will ever go away, because Windows is mostly just gamers and corporate IT installations, and IT people will need full control over that kind of stuff until the end of time, due to law.

> IT people will need full control over that kind of stuff until the end of time, due to law.

This is the other edge of the sword when dealing with leviathans like Microsoft. They cannot directly target & oppress independently-minded assholes like myself without also compromising their target markets.

If some arbitrary megacorps need a way around this, it would be economically infeasible for Microsoft to develop special custom code piles for every one of them in addition to the builds that the general public use, and also ensure the corporate builds don't magically leak out somehow at that scale.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to me as well. Even when those keygens were in zipped files, Defender would flag them as malware and remove them automatically. The only solution I found to this was to keep the keygens in a password protected zipped files.

Interesting ideas here: how antivirus becomes a form of censorship. Maybe that’s an extreme view but it feels like now that Microsoft supplies it’s own defender app. And like all forms of martial law beginning as a way to protect citizens! I also noticed that with win10 when apps crash it sends the data to Microsoft—as though they can fix 3rd party apps for us. Yeesh. I think I’ll skip out on Windows 11 TYVM.

> "Microsoft—as though they can fix 3rd party apps for us.."

They can, and have done for decades. The classic famous one is retold by Joel Spolsky as "[...] a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95". One from Raymond Chen is a program which hacked its way through the control panel printers menu and Microsoft had to detect that, put a dummy menu for it to use, then trigger what it was trying to achieve. Since then application compatibility has become its own subsystem in Windows which developers, enterprises and Microsoft can use to create compatibility shims to make programs keep working even if their makers have gone out of business.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/i...

> "Interesting ideas here: how antivirus becomes a form of censorship. Maybe that’s an extreme view but it feels like now that Microsoft supplies it’s own defender app"

Why didn't it feel like that for all the other antivirus false positives from McAfee, Symantec, Norton, F-Secure, Panda, et al over the years?

And how is Microsoft (not a government) or Defender (optional) anything to do with martial law?

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#286
post #28

I recently unpacked an old archive from the time I was making some shareware few decades ago. Windows Defender instantly ate all keygen.exe files from it. Those keygens were my own keygens for my own software (I wrote them myself and used them to generate keys for my customers back in the day).

It's so disgusting how they police your local files and delete without any prompt, what a joke

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#287
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So how to you explain the complete lack of recording features on TV sets that support streaming services?

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#288
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's the pretty standard behavior on unix. Unless the window manager goes out of its way to override it, mv'ing a folder to a place where one already exists will replace the old folder with the new one. You can go out of your way to do it manually with rsync and similar tools, of course, but by default you're moving directory pointers around, not merging trees.

The window manager manages windows. It has nothing to do with the filesystem or how it's presented to the user.

They meant "window file manager", ie graphical file manager.

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#289
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are downvoting the above comment for some reason, but what is this Windows Defender behavior if not a form of censorship?

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…

> By that logic, what are firefighters doing but censoring homes?

Not inherently, but a disparity in which fires get prevented and put out and with which priority might constitute censorship, just as a disparity in which types of programs are identified as malware might. Many historical examples for the former instantly come to mind, from one library in alexandria to a sexual research institute in nazi germany. Not to imply that this is comparable to those in magnitude of course.

(On second thought, that also applies to systems of explicit censorship, where all media has to be approved but media that exhalts the government line has a higher chance of being approved than media that does not comment. As well as our system of implicit censorship, where every film company has to make money, but a movie produced with approval and material support of the US military has a significantly higher chance of being financially viable.)

Re: Windows Defender blocks qBittorrent

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Maybe this will help some of the more savvy users realize that Windows should be relegated to a virtual machine for when you need a specific Windows app that doesn't run under Wine, and never given access to real hardware. hurr durr windows bad linux good im so smart. you're practically _soaked_ with condescending smarm. Caureful, or it'll rub off on innocent bystanders.

Windows is the dominant operating system, and as such has a giant target on its back. It's true, I despise Windows, but the risk of torrenting on Linux vs the risk of torrenting on Windows is quite a huge difference. And look, Microsoft has been user-hostile for years now, the fact is, this kind of behavior from them doesn't surprise me anymore, and I'm tired of watching people take those punches lying down.

> "and look, Microsoft has been user-hostile for years now"

You know how sometimes people can have things completely backwards, and it's impossible to understand how? This is one of those times.

Windows: the best thing for accessibility, screen readers, keyboard navigation. The best user-side (rather than admin side) automation of programs using things like Autohotkey and COM automation. Windows defender is a response to protect users both from malware and from the predatory behaviour of the likes of McAfee. Enormous amounts invested in hardware compatibility, software backwards compatibility. Generally very good tooling for introspection, performance monitoring, debugging, development on .NET, event tracing, public symbol servers. Famous for GUI wizards making complex tasks possible with less skill. Most typical programs have a next->next->finish install including technical programs like WireShark, Python, etc. "user hostile".

Linux world: a culture where the user should "RTFM", where lack of technical skill is mocked, where a GUI wizard is scorned as inferior and people who use them shunned, where not wanting to self-host a LAMP stack is considered "lazy and incompetent", where technology being difficult is seen as par for the course and people who deal with that are lauded for it, where simple things are complex and common things in Windows land are dismissed with "nobody does that" cluelessness accepted without question.

It's like seeing a billion people walk into shops, exchange money for food, and leave in 5 minutes and hearing someone living on a homestead who works 5am-10pm pickling cabbage and making the vinegar to do so describing shops as "user hostile" because you can't choose the pressure the grapes were crushed with - the tyrants!

Windows is nice.

It's incredible to think that you can go to Add/Remove Programs and switch on a type-1 hypervisor with a checkbox click and a reboot (or with a command line if you want) and that's the kind of engineering which runs through Windows, and people dismiss it because of Candy Crush in the start menu (and Microsoft ruin it with candy crush in the start menu).

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