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I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
111–120 of 196 posts
Re: I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a somewhat useful feedback, however I am not too sure how this can be fixed given the structure of my blog post. Do you think if I just add a line `*WSC is short for Windows Security Center` in the first paragraph this will be enough?
Just wondering is this Slack? Just wondering what kind of logging flow you’re using. https://blog.es3n1n.eu/posts/how-i-ruined-my-vacation/pics/p...
this is discord in "Compact" theme
Re: I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a more performant, less resource-crippling, antivirus for Windows?
It's called no antivirus. It's what this is supposed to do. Antiviruses are useless malware.
Ah yes, I have my Windows power user bingo card dusted off! So far in this thread I’ve got:
- Antivirus software is malware
- We have to disable Windows Updates because I didn’t like them 30 years ago
- Windows Defender hogs resources, laptop reviews showing Windows systems getting 10 hours of web browsing battery life are lying, Windows Defender actually ruins the performance of your computer
- It’s better to complain constantly about Windows and spend hours disabling functionality rather than switch to Linux
I’m just waiting for “Windows sucks I’m thinking about switching to Linux but never end up doing it” and I’ll have a bingo!
Re: I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a somewhat useful feedback, however I am not too sure how this can be fixed given the structure of my blog post. Do you think if I just add a line `*WSC is short for Windows Security Center` in the first paragraph this will be enough?
My suggestion: In this post I will briefly describe the journey I went through while implementing defendnot, a tool that disables Windows Defender by using the Windows Security Center (WSC) service API directly.
thank you! i changed the first paragraph to include these changes
Re: I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a more performant, less resource-crippling, antivirus for Windows?
This whole topic is a massive eye roll. In what universe is windows defender “resource-crippling?” There are windows laptops that will sip battery for an entire workday plus extra hours while running defender the entire time. So clearly it’s not “resource-crippling” if it can run on a laptop with a single digit wattage power draw. And then we’ve got the “I need to control my system I’m too smart for antivirus” folks…
> In what universe is windows defender “resource-crippling?”
This one? Not all of us want to throw perfectly usable hardware in the e-waste pile. Windows 10 was perfectly fine on my old Haswell miniPC, save for Defender wasting CPU cycles and IO doing..."checks".
Re: I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are still active attacks against DOS and Win98. Automated driveby attacks, just looking to increase the size of a bot farm. There are still new exploits being released against rather old systems.
Now I'm curious, how do you attack DOS? I mean, it comes without networking support, and if you have local access, you're already privileged.
You attack the networking stacks for it, those are still actively developed (mTCP was last updated Jan 2025) as businesses use networked DOS for quite a few things. A DOS networking stack consists of a packet driver, a NIC driver, and a protocol library. All of those have attack surface. NIC drivers in particular often haven't really had updates since they were first released. Because for hardware manufacturers of the time the goal was on getting people to use the hardware, not on supporting them. There are newer DOS NIC drivers than you'd think too. Realtek last I checked still makes and supports an ISA NIC.
Re: I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's called no antivirus. It's what this is supposed to do. Antiviruses are useless malware.
Ah yes, I have my Windows power user bingo card dusted off! So far in this thread I’ve got: - Antivirus software is malware - We have to disable Windows Updates because I didn’t like them 30 years ago - Windows Defender hogs resources, laptop reviews showing Windows systems getting 10 hours of web browsing battery life are lying, Windows Defender actually ruins the performance of your computer - It’s better to compla…
We use some software that stores each record in a separate file; basically using the filesystem as a database.
Without adding an exception to Windows defender, that software is unusably slow. Once the exception is added (or defender is turned off) the software is nice and fast again.
Re: I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, I have my Windows power user bingo card dusted off! So far in this thread I’ve got: - Antivirus software is malware - We have to disable Windows Updates because I didn’t like them 30 years ago - Windows Defender hogs resources, laptop reviews showing Windows systems getting 10 hours of web browsing battery life are lying, Windows Defender actually ruins the performance of your computer - It’s better to compla…
We use some software that stores each record in a separate file; basically using the filesystem as a database. Without adding an exception to Windows defender, that software is unusably slow. Once the exception is added (or defender is turned off) the software is nice and fast again.
It sounds like adding an exception is the intended way to do exactly what you’re doing and resolves the issue entirely.
It also sounds like you wrote bad software that didn’t consider the architecture of the parent OS.
Re: I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
This whole topic is a massive eye roll. In what universe is windows defender “resource-crippling?” There are windows laptops that will sip battery for an entire workday plus extra hours while running defender the entire time. So clearly it’s not “resource-crippling” if it can run on a laptop with a single digit wattage power draw. And then we’ve got the “I need to control my system I’m too smart for antivirus” folks…
> In what universe is windows defender “resource-crippling?” This one? Not all of us want to throw perfectly usable hardware in the e-waste pile. Windows 10 was perfectly fine on my old Haswell miniPC, save for Defender wasting CPU cycles and IO doing..."checks".
Let’s cut the bullshit, Defender is basically unchanged as a concept since Windows Vista or maybe even Windows XP. It runs completely fine on 15 year old hardware.
We are in the “Windows users complain endlessly and refuse to switch to Linux” bingo card right now. Windows has been this way since before you bought that mini PC.
Re: I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
But disabling updates on the system connected to the Internet is a terrible idea. How do you update that afterwards?
I have yet to see concrete evidence that disabling Windows update and windows defender would elevate risk of having the system compromised in any meaningful way. I installed Windows 10 2016 ltsc on a VM at the end of last year out of curiosity to test that. Disabled wupdate and defender before letting it access the internet so that it was basically 8 years behind on any updates. I tried browsing all kinds of sketchy…
You benefit from the fact that most machines are patched. If a lot more people used 2016 builds and didn’t patch you’d see a lot more exploits.