Live data from Hacker News

Antivirus software deletes itself

thenextweb.com

11–20 of 30 posts

Re: Antivirus software deletes itself

#11

The author of this article doesn't know what the term "bricking" means. If you delete key Windows files you will not "brick" a PC. "Bricking" is the process of turning a physical piece of hardware into a device as useful as a "brick" (thus its name). It was coined to describe what happens when you try and flash a phone and it is unrecoverably damaged.

I thought "Bricking" is a relative term. For someone with an compatible in circuit debugger/programer that phone would be probably salvageable. For someone else a corrupted operation system could be indistinguishable from the "bricked" state, because of lack of experience, or skills to fix the problem.

Re: Antivirus software deletes itself

#12

The author of this article doesn't know what the term "bricking" means. If you delete key Windows files you will not "brick" a PC. "Bricking" is the process of turning a physical piece of hardware into a device as useful as a "brick" (thus its name). It was coined to describe what happens when you try and flash a phone and it is unrecoverably damaged.

This article was written by the same guy who last week described Steve Wozniak as "infamous" in a different article, then later went back and changed it.

Re: Antivirus software deletes itself

#14
Nice, taste your own medicine AV companies!

Recent movement (last couple of years) by AV companies blocking everything which leads legitimate small businesses to take the stupid whitelisting route via AV companies or pointless customer calls to explain it's a false positive (and even when customer is convinced it's still not good enough because corporate doesn't allow them to exclude some binaries or disable AV).

Re: Antivirus software deletes itself

#16
post #11

The author of this article doesn't know what the term "bricking" means. If you delete key Windows files you will not "brick" a PC. "Bricking" is the process of turning a physical piece of hardware into a device as useful as a "brick" (thus its name). It was coined to describe what happens when you try and flash a phone and it is unrecoverably damaged.

I thought "Bricking" is a relative term. For someone with an compatible in circuit debugger/programer that phone would be probably salvageable. For someone else a corrupted operation system could be indistinguishable from the "bricked" state, because of lack of experience, or skills to fix the problem.

Realistically even if you had the equipment, those phones are beyond economical repair given the amount of time you would have to invest in fixing them.

Even if you remove key Windows files sometimes Windows can recover its self using the backup copies located in %windir%\winsxs\Backup (and several other places depending on system configuration).

But generally bricking refers to the state of disrepair where something has to be thrown in the bin because it cannot be used in the future. The closest PC equivalents would be either corrupting the BIOS/UEFI or over-heating a component like the graphics card.

Re: Antivirus software deletes itself

#17
post #11

The author of this article doesn't know what the term "bricking" means. If you delete key Windows files you will not "brick" a PC. "Bricking" is the process of turning a physical piece of hardware into a device as useful as a "brick" (thus its name). It was coined to describe what happens when you try and flash a phone and it is unrecoverably damaged.

I thought "Bricking" is a relative term. For someone with an compatible in circuit debugger/programer that phone would be probably salvageable. For someone else a corrupted operation system could be indistinguishable from the "bricked" state, because of lack of experience, or skills to fix the problem.

True, I've "bricked" my Android phone a few times by flashing a new OS version, and always recovered it with ADB.
Post reply on HN