I would like anyone that considers Microsoft to be a recent champion of Open Source to reflect on corporate doublespeak. It's plausible that this bug was engineered as an attack on Firefox.
Never attribute to malice…
Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
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Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#82Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
My car also nags me every time I unbuckle my seatbelt to park yet that doesn't mean everyone should have it unbuckled all the time. There's a reason it's designed to be naggy. Having everyone easily disable Windows Defender will not lead to a great outcome. There's a reason malware on Windows has been on a steep decline from the Windows XP days and I'd prefer it to keep it that way.
Not all uses cases for a car are the same. Some are held entirely on private property and are used as work vehicles where the seat belt chime would be unnecessary and distracting. Which is why most manufacturers provide a sneaky mechanism to disable it. I own the vehicle, why wouldn't they let me disable the nag? Their solution? Make it intentionally complicated, but still possible: Step 1: Turn your headlight switch…
I remember doing this sort of song and dance with my RAM and Jeep. Sometimes I am just moving around a parking lot for a brief moment, or especially when off roading (read: stuck) and don't want the constant beeping.
Seat belts are 100% an immediate habit for me. Driving at any rate of speed without one makes me feel super sketchy and uncomfortable, so the nag is not needed at all.
On my Ford's I would use FORScan to defeat it via the OBD2 port.
I do have a security gateway bypass module for my truck though so hopefully I will be able to start playing around with AlfaOBD soon.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Newer versions of Thunderbird have been rendered completely unusable unless I exclude %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Thunderbird from real-time scans.
Thunderbird is atrociously slow even without an AV with any mailbox that isn't tiny. Could it be that yours has just grown over the years and Defender amplifies it?
It went from ~20 seconds of freezing on every server request to no freezing at all after adding the exception. That's quite the amplification.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#85I would like anyone that considers Microsoft to be a recent champion of Open Source to reflect on corporate doublespeak. It's plausible that this bug was engineered as an attack on Firefox.
If Microsoft were so good at software engineering that they could pull off such an attack on Firefox, then maybe they do deserve to have a monopoly. /s
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#86I would like anyone that considers Microsoft to be a recent champion of Open Source to reflect on corporate doublespeak. It's plausible that this bug was engineered as an attack on Firefox.
Have you any semblance of proof of this? By the looks of it took Firefox a few years to figure out what the repro was, they reported it to MS, it was (very) promptly fixed and they were warned that the syscall they were using isn't being used as intended and they should consider changes to FF for future use cases.
I don't have proof. I'm presenting a theory based on circumstantial evidence. I think it says just as much to reject a theory without proof as it does to present a theory without proof. Let me break down the context in which I make put forward my theory.
* Corporate doublespeak is a well documented tactic in which a business will project a message when the truth is the opposite of the message. Sometimes they use euphemisms, ambiguity, or omissions. I am stating that we cannot take Microsoft's press releases about being Open Source friendly at face value.
* Five years ago Edge was rebuilt with a chromium backend and Microsoft had a large campaign to increase adoption of Edge.
* Reduced Firefox performance would make Edge compare more favorably. This error was clearly in Microsoft's favor.
* It is common for companies that own a platform to create advantages for their applications running on the platform.
* Microsoft has a long history in the browser wars, highlighted by an antitrust lawsuit in the late 90s. Their anticompetitive behavior regarding browsers was a key part of the lawsuit.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#87Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.
You assume all Firefox users are on Windows (they're not) and that all Firefox users on Windows are affected (I and my SO were not). Who knows what edge case triggered that bug to manifest but I for one haven't seen it in the wild in the years we've been using FF. Probably difficult in such a large org to allocate dev resources to chase down and fix a bug few people were impacted by.
Around 80% of Firefox users are on Windows, per https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
That same site also suggests that Firefox has around 200e6 monthly active users, the average user uses Firefox 3.5 days a week, and for 5.5 hours per day.
My math could be wrong, but taking the above into account, and arnaudsm's 5 W estimate, I come up with an upper bound of around 80 MW. Discount that further by whatever proportion of Windows users you assume were actually affected. Not a whole coal power plant, but nothing to sneeze at.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
doesn't this bug only manifest itself if one is using microsoft defender as their only security solution, and not a 3rd party AV/IS? if so, then the number of Firefox users in this calculation is much lower.
I don't know if that's the case. I'm a Firefox user but consider all the 3rd party apps nearly as much malware as the things they are trying to solve. I run strictly defender and try to make good choices when downloading and browsing.
I actually replace Defender with a 3rd party choice (Eset) for this very same reason - to wrestle some control over my OS from Microsoft. I find Defender to be overbearing in so many ways.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the equivalent of an average coal power plant Produces in an hour, four hours?
Continuous. We need one less coal plant to support the Firefox code after the bug fix.
Coal makes only 12% of the electricity, in the US at least. Natural gas makes 36% and oil makes 33%.
Re: Microsoft fixes 5-year-old Defender bug, reducing Firefox-related CPU use by 75%
#90Quick napkin math of the wasted power : Firefox has ~300e6 users, let's assume the bug wasted 5 extra watts 4 hours a day. That's 250 megawatts saved, the equivalent of an average coal power plant. Because some Microsoft engineer missed a bug.
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