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

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

#401
It is a bit puzzling that so many people think that Kaspersky is not connected to the siloviki.

I can recommend reading an investigation by Russian journalists on the subject: "Inside The Fight For The Soul Of Kaspersky Lab" https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ilyazhegulev/russia-kas...

The original Russian title of the investigation was "Orcs who defeated the techies: How the siloviki infiltrated Kaspersky Lab — and what it led to", you can check this story in Russian here: https://meduza.io/feature/2018/01/22/orki-pobedivshie-tehnar...

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

#402

The only software most Windows PCs need out of the box is TinyWall ( https://tinywall.pados.hu/ )

How does it compare to simplewall from Henry++? https://www.henrypp.org/product/simplewall

That's the one I use to catch outbound connections.

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was only one extant US dragnet surveillance program in Snowden's leaks, which was the phone metadata collection, so I don't know why you have the plural. Snowden's leaks showed the lawyers' justification for that program ( https://www.aclu.org/files/natsec/nsa/20130816/2009%20OIG%20... ) which said that the data does not fall under Fourth Amendment protection by Supreme Court precedent, and it was never ruled u…

Snowden's leaks revealed several mass surveillance, including PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora. As for the (un)constitutionality of mass collection of Americans' call records, here's what Reuters[0] says: > In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intell…

PRISM isn't mass surveillance. Snowden's slides clearly show it is a way for the NSA to ingest data from FBI wiretaps [1], which are targeted, which is why the only lawsuit brought against it was dropped. High school dropout Snowden and useful idiot Greenwald were too stupid to understand the slides they released and were called out about it immediately on Twitter. The New York Times [2][3] and CNET [4] subsequently correctly described the program, and WaPo retracted its original description. Now, Snowden never talks about PRISM out of embarrassment, only the phone metadata program.

XKeystore is simply the database that stores data collected outside the US, and Tempora is not even a US program, so clearly neither can violate the 4th Amendment, which is why no lawsuits were brought against either program.

> Handing out warrants that allow authorities to collect call logs of millions of Americans is blatantly Unconstitutional.

Obviously not. The program was limited to collecting millions of call logs instead of all call logs after the leaks, and that was considered so obviously constitutional that nobody sued. [5]

[1] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DqqNh3fnfGCY1Zmk41LsSnjgUBg=...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/07/us/comparing-t...

[4] https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...

[5] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-surveillance/sp...

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

#404

Is there any point in using antivirus these days anyway? I'm open to being wrong here, but I'm under the impression that antivirus exists only to tick boxes in outdated security compliance checklists. How big of a threat are viruses compared to, say, rogue antivirus products themselves?

EDR is the future, not impenetrable by any means but it protects enterprise a great deal. And it allows the network admins some control, which makes everyone feel good.

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

#405
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of press/courts/rule of law is that at least you have a chance. Without those, no chance. That matters. The US is not some monolithic entity. It's almost weirdly schizophrenic. Yes, the government will e.g. use some super-shaky legal arguments to justify torture ahem "enhanced interrogation", but on the other hand Freedom of Information Act requests still get processed. Yes, the NSA will spy on US citizens,…

“there is a broad and deep tradition of fighting the government and not going to jail like Navalny.” Guess the 98% Federal conviction rate isn’t accounted for when talking about the deep tradition of citizens fighting the government. Personal opinion, all governments are corrupt, including the US

Dude it's 98% because the feds only take slam dunk cases to trial, and they're extremely professional. Seriously, read up on bad convictions, it's nearly always state or local judicial systems. Frequently it is federal prosecutors that break open the corruption.

All governments are corrupt, but is it remotely plausible they are equally corrupt? Are they not comparable?

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

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Windows one of the best things you can do, AV or not, is to NOT make your daily driver account an administrator. Create an admin account with a secure password and then another standard user account for yourself and use that standard user for everything. When installing something you will need to put in your admin password but it is really not a big deal to do so. Massively reduces your chance of ransomware and a…

The last point is probably the more important one. Basically all data people care about is not protected by UAC.

> Basically all data people care about is not protected by UAC.

Sure, any program can delete the Documents folder, but how can you prevent that from happening?

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snowden's leaks revealed several mass surveillance, including PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora. As for the (un)constitutionality of mass collection of Americans' call records, here's what Reuters[0] says: > In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans' telephone records violated the Foreign Intell…

PRISM isn't mass surveillance. Snowden's slides clearly show it is a way for the NSA to ingest data from FBI wiretaps [1], which are targeted, which is why the only lawsuit brought against it was dropped. High school dropout Snowden and useful idiot Greenwald were too stupid to understand the slides they released and were called out about it immediately on Twitter. The New York Times [2][3] and CNET [4] subsequently…

There are many obvious errors in your claims, such as this:

> Tempora is not even a US program, so clearly neither can violate the 4th Amendment

The NSA is a partner in the program (led by the British, with whom the US has a very close intelligence partnership). The program does bulk collection on undersea cables which do carry Americans' data. This is prima facie a violation of the 4th Amendment.

> which is why no lawsuits were brought against either program

The reason why lawsuits so rarely get anywhere against any of these mass surveillance programs is that in the US legal system, you have to be able to prove standing in order to challenge them. The US isn't like other systems with dedicated constitutional courts that can review laws on their own initiative. Someone has to be able to show that they themselves have been specifically harmed. Unless you can prove that the NSA specifically looked at your data and used it against you in some way, you can't challenge the NSA's surveillance. By the very nature of these programs, it's nearly impossible for anyone to prove that.

> The New York Times [2][3] and CNET [4] subsequently correctly described the program

The NY Times article you cite describes it as a program that collects information from the largest US tech companies on the basis of FISA requests. Just so you recall, FISA is a court that operates in secret, that grants virtually all requests, and that has demonstrably signed off on Unconstitutional bulk surveillance (e.g., mass collection of call logs).

And by the way, the type of behavior we're discussing here, which we know for a fact the US government has engaged in, is exactly what people in this thread are alleging the Russian government might theoretically do to Kaspersky.

> High school dropout Snowden

Yes, a "high school dropout" who was paid 200 grand a year and given access to the NSA's classified networks. What a dummy!

> The program was limited to collecting millions of call logs instead of all call logs after the leaks, and that was considered so obviously constitutional that nobody sued.

This is not how the process of challenging an Unconstitutional law works. You can't just say, "That's Unconstitutional" and then sue. You have to show that you have personally been targeted. That's why Rosa Parks had to physically sit down on the bus and wait to get thrown off. That's what gave her standing to challenge Montgomery's segregated bus system. Just knowing that a surveillance program exists and has probably illegally collected your information does not automatically give you the ability to challenge said program in court.

Bulk collection of records of millions of Americans (this is just the warrant that we know of, and there were almost certainly similar warrants covering most Americans, because by design, the program was meant to do bulk analysis of all call records) is obviously unconstitutional, but also very difficult to legally challenge.

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

#408

So... let's say a person still wanted to use an Antivirus product anyways, despite not really trusting them due to reasons like this article here; or anything you can say about Norton, etc, etc. What would you all suggest? Aside from McAfee, Norton and of course Kaspersky. I'm all ears. Some helpful hints though might be: 1. I don't want it giving me pop-ups constantly to remind me of a sale they are having. 2. It ca…

Windows Defender. See: https://0ut3r.space/2022/03/06/windows-defender/ and recent discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30580444

No post body was provided.

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

#409
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find the actual profile on Wired anymore, but I found it on the internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20140423055434/http://www.wired.... and also a sort of response to it https://web.archive.org/web/20140426095603/http://www.wired.... After I read that profile I decided I'd never use the software. I remember before news spread of the Russian troll farms being real, people talked about it like "who wo…

The original Wired links are: https://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff-kaspersky/ https://www.wired.com/2012/07/kaspersky-indy/

So odd I thought I tried this and got an "Oops" I must have missed something - thank you!

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

#410
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kaspersky graduated from The Technical Faculty of the KGB Higher School in 1987. That was a definition of a dirtbag in Soviet time.

Was every 17 years old who attended anything with KGB written on it, really dubbed a dirtbag in the 70-80s? Even knowing there were 100 years of Red Scare this sounds a lot like like a neurotic leap conclusion, I can't imagine KGB's cryptography school teaching teenagers torture skills or something like that.

Every single Soviet citizen knew what KGB is and what it stands for. Unlike you I don't need to imagine anything. I remember.
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