Kaspersky is declared a US national security threat and is banned by the FCC

I think it's reasonable to acknowledge that, due to my citizenship and physical residence location, the NSA is probably more of a threat to my personal freedom than the FSB, but also acknowledge that, all things being equal, the FSB is a shadier organization than the NSA, with fewer legal restrictions on its behavior.

funny you say that, because bitDefender always outshines Kaspersky in all the AV tests and was always ranked #1

also dont forget that the Global Research & Analysis Team @ Kaspersky is not Russian

> The Russian government is objectively worse by any honest metric.

Any metric you and I would like to use, yes. The govt of Saudi Arabia, which is an ally of ours, murders journalists with a chainsaw on a foreign soil and smuggles the body out of the host country in suitcases - yet no Saudi company is penalized. Supporting a proxy war in Yemen is not that different from Russian invasion, but somehow it suffers no consequences for doing so.

It's actually easy to justify: for the vast majority of Saudis prince MBS is a good ruler. Who are we to judge how their government works, given completely different cultural backgrounds, religions, and different expectations resulting from that difference? We'd be happier if Saudi Arabia was a democracy with a rule of law instead of chainsaw, but if the majority of Saudis prefer the latter, we shouldn't try to force them to change, even if homosexuals can be legally stoned to death there.

It's an easy argument, but it undermines the "objectively" part of your statement. If we accept MBS, we should accept Putin. If we don't accept the way SA works, as we don't accept Russia's, then we should not trade with the Saudis. We do trade with them, though - we (Poland) even increased (2x or more) the amount of oil imported from them this year, and they continue being our friends and valuable allies in the region.

The situation is frankly schizophrenic. Either there are objective metrics, in which case they should be applied everywhere equally, or we allow Saudis do what they want, but then we have no grounds on which to condemn Putin.

If we want to still stay close to Saudi Arabia and condemn Putin, we have to agree that we condemn Putin based on something else than objective standards of governing.

I'd really like for our foreign policies to stay true to the ideals we hold dear, but that just doesn't seem to be the case. Putin is an actual, real threat, so we don't accept him and his buddies, while MBS only dismembers his own citizens (and he even allowed women to drive!), so we accept him. That's also a kind of "objective metric", but it's far from what you meant, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable TBH.

> So can microsoft, adobe, google, etc. Even without them, NSA can intercept the hardware and put their software on those boxes...

Those companies often actually have people scan the hardware they receive to check for alterations. There was a whole thing about this a decade ago where a reporter (wrongly, IIRC) accused Facebook and Google of having compromised motherboards, and people from those companies were commenting here about how they are actually very careful with their supply lines and have people vet what they receive with scanning electron microscopes in some instances. (I'll try to find some of the submissions here and edit them as links on the bottom shortly).

I also have it on good authority (a good friend that worked at Google at the time) that Google found out that someone (the NSA) was tapping their inter-datacenter links and that's one of the reasons they made sure all data between datacenters was encrypted, and that was prior to the Snowden leaks.

So yes, agencies are constantly attempting to infiltrate large tech companies for their own purposes. That doesn't mean they always succeed, or that those companies just give up and accept that it happens. They all fight it quite actively.

>That said, every major non-Windows platform in its default install configuration is inherently more secure than a Windows system that has had all of its known default security issues addressed, even those beyond what Windows Defender provides.

Highly disputed.

>Windows is not simply a more attractive target for malware authors because it is a more popular platform with a larger install base, it is a more popular target because it is inherently insecure and we know it is inherently insecure because it would be foolish for anyone to run Windows and access the WWW without first addressing its security issues.

Do you have any specifics about any of this? It really just sounds like Slashdot talking points from the Windows XP era.