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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

#391

Post by saiya-jin »

laurent92 wrote: post #282
saiya-jin wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, as non-US citizen, thus having sub-human rights in eyes of every US 3-letter agency, still prefer very much US approach to, well, practically any matter compared to Russian one. For Russians, they really don't like anybody else. All that slavic closeness is crap as we can see in Ukraine and elsewhere. Heck, they don't care about other Russians neither, just a cannon fodder and poor fuckers to exploit and then thro…

It would help US to condemn Colin Powell for brandishing supposed proof of WMD at the UN Counsel in 2003, which they never found after invasion. It would help for the US to stop Predator attacks. Most of the world is convinced that they are illegal and illegitimate. And as a French person, I preferred Trump, because he didn’t trigger any new war and he calmed down Little Rocket Man. He even shook his hand! And donate…

That's... a strange opinion from French person (although looking at current French government's actual involvement in Ukraine it kind of corresponds).

Why - Trump was extremely close to removing US from Nato in 2018, a moment Putin waited for decade and a half (how he knew about this is another story, let's say my opinion is really not favorable for Trump and tend to lean on US secret services conclusions on their cooperation). Only conservative hawks in his own government managed to steer him away from this tragic moment.

For any European not in bed with russian spying conglomerate that's an existential threat. We can see it now. Ukraine wouldn't have any significant arms deliveries and would be left to die and be enslaved again by Russia, with Trump cheering this as brilliant move (what he still actually did).

Russians would take over Baltic states, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary (although there is already pro-kremel person installed so not much work needed), possibly also Romania, Moldova, Czech Republic. Also that pesky Georgia, who do they think they are having their own state and democracy. Simply good old pre-1989 setup with good old soviet terror. That's maybe why you guys don't care so much about Ukraine, it seems too far and not your fight, car manufacturing in Russia seems more important. Considering what Putin actually says about whole Europe, you may be wrong this time.

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

#392

Post by yywwbbn »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #228
stjohnswarts wrote: post #199

kaspersky should have completely left russia decades ago if they wanted to free their reputation from FSB taint.

Like all the US companies leaving the US in 2003? I only remember US companies trashing France around that time.

Maybe because US still had free press and (to some extent, but in a much better state than Russia) the rule of law in 2003?

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

#393

Post by account42 »

cf141q5325 wrote: post #80
mrtnmcc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Shouldnt i have the same concerns with software from the US? You dont really have to nationalize to force devs to push malicious code (looking at you Australia)

You should absolutely have concerns with proprietary software from the US but unless you are in a country that is currently in a cold-war relationship with the US the concern is likely VERY different.

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

#394

Post by account42 »

jacobr1 wrote: post #220
older wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't be more wrong when you say "just like Russia". It is not even close. The killings of journalists, repressions... The last independent newspaper has to close its activity because it is not possible anymore to report truth while complying to the Russian laws: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/28/russias-novaya-gaze... All this with Russian government/president approval rating of 70%.

Without independent media, how can we trust the approval rating is accurate?

You can never get a completely accurate approval ratings. However there is enough evidence that a nontrivial percentage of russians does not disprove of the war. Besides the ones already mentioned in this thread, don't forget that it is not Putin personally fighting in Ukraine or arresting protesters or posting propaganda. Does it matter if it is 70% or 40% when it is obviously enough for the state to continue its control over the populace and thus could also compel their IT companies to work for Kremlin needs and against their users.

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

#395

Post by null_deref »

fatnoah wrote: post #185
the_snooze wrote: post #33

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?

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

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

#396

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

Master_Odin wrote: post #380
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting a numeric value on this is silly. The fact is that the United States government can compel companies to aid in its surveillance (just recall when they forced Snowden's email provider to install a backdoor). Even if a company does not want to participate or is not compelled to do so, the US government has very significant capacity to break into and co-opt systems (all the way from targeted surveillance of indi…

Yeah, I remember when the US government took Apple to court to get them to allow FBI to have a backdoor through the encryption and Apple did not capitulate, though the cases were eventually dropped. While US agencies certainly do crooked things, they do not have the capacity to force companies to do stuff under threat of violence and otherwise that Russia does with Kaspersky.

I also remember when:

* The NSA secretly obtained access to every Verizon customer's entire call log. This was blatantly illegal (the 4th Amendment forbids general warrants), and it only came to light because of Snowden's leaks.[0]

* Snowden's email provider, Lavabit, was compelled to install a backdoor that allowed the US government to read the emails of all of the provider's users. The process was supposed to be secret: the company was under a gag order. The public only found out because the founder spoke out.[1]

There are many examples like this from the US (just look up "National Security Letter," or take a look at Snowden's leaks). You're citing one example in which a company successfully refused a request, but we also know from Snowden that there was mass collection on most Americans that went on for years in secret, despite the fact that it was blatantly illegal.

The scale of surveillance conducted globally by US intelligence agencies is unparalleled. I'm sure Russia wishes it could collect information on the same scale, but it simply does not have the ability to do so.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...

1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/20/why-di...

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

#397

Post by account42 »

dblohm7 wrote: post #129
the_snooze wrote: post #33

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?

I used to work on the team at Mozilla that got stuck with dealing with all the terrible shit that AV programs do to web browsers. My recommendation for Windows users is to just use Defender. All that other crap does the exact same stuff to other programs that malware does, except they do so in the name of "security."

> I used to work on the team at Mozilla that got stuck with dealing with all the terrible shit that AV programs do to web browsers.

Yet Mozilla contributes to the terrible shit that Google Safe Browsing is doing to independent and open source developers hosting their software.

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

#398

Post by account42 »

KronisLV wrote: post #171
the_snooze wrote: post #33

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?

It surprises me how much many posters on Hacker News seem to be against using any sort of AV software - not even the built in Defender solution in Windows, if you have to use the OS for whatever reason, but i often see the sentiment expressed that supposedly the entire class of software is useless. What happened to defense in depth with all of the layers you can introduce? Surely if you run a Linux server, you might…

> but i often see the sentiment expressed that supposedly the entire class of software is useless.

AV software, including Defender, is not useless, it is actively harmful because it prevents people from running legitimate software without any recourse for non-experts or the original developer.

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

#399

Post by teh_klev »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #198
teh_klev wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has had "Microsoft Security Essentials" built-in for longer than I can remember (10+ years?). It's not a terrible thing and keeps out of your way and doesn't seem to bog your machine down. Unlike the steaming pile of crap that my work computer runs (EndPoint) that consumes 60-80% CPU when doing its weekly full scan for over an hour right in the middle of the working day. MSE is really all I've used since binn…

Took me a while to figure out why my browsers always seem to randomly pause for about 30 seconds. It's that piece of crap McCaffee. I can watch it's process go to 100% when the browser (firefox and vivaldi) freeze. It's garbage and I wish I could turn it off and just use MS AV but the IT staff swear by McAffee so I live with it.

> but the IT staff swear by McAffee

I feel your pain. We have a load of other crap loaded such as Umbrella that is supposed to protect us from harmful websites. It does stuff like intercept DNS lookups etc. It's such a pile of shite and doesn't work properly when I need VPN into our cloud infrastructure. When it's configured so badly it feels really anti-work. But hey ho, "security reasons".

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

#400

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #364
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dragnet surveillance programs that Snowden revealed are obviously outlawed by the 4th Amendment. Of course lawyers working for these agencies will try to justify them. That's what they're paid to do. During the Bush Jr. years, lawyers for the administration also argued that torture was legal, despite the fact that it's blatantly illegal. Nevertheless, these programs are incredibly difficult to challenge in court,…

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 Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.

The court did not make any ruling on the Constitutionality of the NSA's mass surveillance program, but they wrote in their decision that it very likely was Unconstitutional.[1]

Historically speaking, this NSA program is exactly the type of search that the 4th Amendment was intended to prevent. Americans were upset about "writs of assistance" that gave colonial officials wide powers to conduct searches against classes of people. That's why the 4th Amendment requires warrants to be specific and limited in scope. Handing out warrants that allow authorities to collect call logs of millions of Americans is blatantly Unconstitutional, and is exactly the sort of thing the 4th Amendment was intended to put a stop to.

0. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying-idUSKBN25T...

1. https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/09/02/1...

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