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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

#411

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.

It is not just UAC though - when your daily driver is NOT an adminsitrator then how is most ransomware or malware or whatever going to run and install itself in the first place?

UAC still pops up whether you use an admin account or not - it just requires the admin password when you use a standard account (which is, of course, still more secure). But the real advantage is that the account you are using does not have those admin privileges in the first place.

The other big advantage is that if this account is compromised in anyway (say if you used the same password to login to Chrome and Windows on your standard account) the hackers only get the password to your non privileged account. Of course this can be mitigated as well by really good password policy but I find for the average user they often re-use passwords and separating the two accounts forces them to often re-use the one that matters least.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current AV software bloatware is a scourge on the world. I spent about 30 minutes this weekend helping my sister-in-law debug a slow internet. My observations were that attempting to do anything resulted in about a 5-10 second pause, and general sluggish response when trying to anything online. I disabled anti-virus, etc. and it was still slow. I tried Edge and everything was super-fast. Digging further, the issue wa…

How can a software this bad hit production? I had a good laugh

The developers probably test it using beefy machines and very small latency to their dedicated test servers in the same building. On the other hand, their users probably use old or slow machines connected to busy oversubscribed servers halfway across the world causing significant latency.

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

#413

Ok, let's cut the crap. Is Kaspersky a dirtbag or not? I suspect not, but it is an unfortunate accident he was born in and runs his company from Russia, the government of which is a dirtbag, so, correct me if I am wrong, Kaspersky must be a dirtbag by association, but especially for discovering Stuxnet. Believable, but I think the real reasons Kaspersky is persona non grata is due to having discovered Stuxnet, and Ka…

The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government? They have demonstrated that they are not shy about using gangster tactics. One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong lega…

No post body was provided.

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

#414
post #63

Ok, let's cut the crap. Is Kaspersky a dirtbag or not? I suspect not, but it is an unfortunate accident he was born in and runs his company from Russia, the government of which is a dirtbag, so, correct me if I am wrong, Kaspersky must be a dirtbag by association, but especially for discovering Stuxnet. Believable, but I think the real reasons Kaspersky is persona non grata is due to having discovered Stuxnet, and Ka…

Plenty of legit potential concerns.. Russian govt could "nationalize" Kaspersky at any moment and push rogue updates.

Or rouge updates?

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

#415

Ok, let's cut the crap. Is Kaspersky a dirtbag or not? I suspect not, but it is an unfortunate accident he was born in and runs his company from Russia, the government of which is a dirtbag, so, correct me if I am wrong, Kaspersky must be a dirtbag by association, but especially for discovering Stuxnet. Believable, but I think the real reasons Kaspersky is persona non grata is due to having discovered Stuxnet, and Ka…

The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government? They have demonstrated that they are not shy about using gangster tactics. One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong lega…

> The problem is: how do you run a business that has offices and physical assets in Russia, without being at least partially beholden to the Russian government?

The same could be said for businesses that have offices and physical assets in the US.

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

#416
I understand why this decision was made. However I want to put it out there, the Kaspersky antivirus and also the Kaspersky internet security suite helped save my business behind so many time back 15 years ago. Great product, the best I knew of in the Anti virus class.

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

#417

Ok, let's cut the crap. Is Kaspersky a dirtbag or not? I suspect not, but it is an unfortunate accident he was born in and runs his company from Russia, the government of which is a dirtbag, so, correct me if I am wrong, Kaspersky must be a dirtbag by association, but especially for discovering Stuxnet. Believable, but I think the real reasons Kaspersky is persona non grata is due to having discovered Stuxnet, and Ka…

[dead]

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US. That point would be a lot stronger if the US government hadn't demonstrated shocking callousness and disregard for international law in their…

Hold up. Downed a plane is different from grounded a plane. I don't know the Belarusian case, but either you misused the word or they are very different.

Grounded a plane, yes, sorry. I meant they forced it to land (in the US case, by having neighboring countries close their airspace mid-flight).

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

#419
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One could say that the same is true in the US, but I believe the degree matters. Although the US government and intelligence agencies will and do try to overreach, there is a strong legal and cultural tradition of exposing, resisting, and fighting these overreaches in the US. That point would be a lot stronger if the US government hadn't demonstrated shocking callousness and disregard for international law in their…

International law isn't really a thing if it has no teeth. I would be more worried about the US breaking its own laws. Which they of course do, on occasion. But there is a lot of pushback and not too much fear of reprisal if you call them out and fight them on it. For example, we are in the process of appointing a supreme court justice that, during her career, has fought against US Government overeach and represented…

My point isn't "the US is bad because it doesn't respect international law".

My point is that the US is willing to go pretty damn far to put some high-profile dissidents in a hole and throw away the key, and there is very little pushback both internally and internationally, which kind of undercuts the whole "the US government would hesitate to do X because whistleblowers would stop them" argument.

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold up. Downed a plane is different from grounded a plane. I don't know the Belarusian case, but either you misused the word or they are very different.

They forced the plane to land in Belarus by threatening it with fighter jets while it was nearly out of their airspace. IIRC they pretended there was a bomb threat or some other nonsense.

"Downed" is usually understood as "shot down".
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