The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast • Hacker News Board

Re: The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

#41

Post by philjohn » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

rokalakt wrote: post #34

goatinaboat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside the SV bubble law, accounting, banking, medicine, general management etc all pay higher than programming, with less stress, more job security and higher prestige (if that matters to you).

Not really. Devs in the uk earn far more than most of these jobs you mentioned. Perhaps you are working with the wrong company.

There is quite a large difference between tech salaries depending on nationality of the company, their approach to tech and location in the UK.

A Principal Software Engineer in the South East can make six figures easily, the same in the midlands will be much less, and that's only 90 miles apart.

Re: The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

#42

Post by philjohn » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

c16 wrote: post #6

slartibardfast0 wrote: post #2

wish AV vendors would stop MiTM attacks on HTTPs

This. I lost a lot of respect when Firefox complained that something was wrong, and it turned out to be Avast doing a man in the middle attack to 'protect' me on https websites.

That's why if you want to install Avast you deselect everything except for the file shield and behaviour shield.

Re: The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

#43

Post by rasz » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

thomasdd wrote: post #5

Maybe just my point-of-view. But Czech-Slovak companies have strong influence in antivirus software. With avast.com / avg.com / eset.com ...or does every country in world have their own AV software (local)giants? I'am curious...

Eastern Europe ran on pirated software thru the nineties. You need good antivirus when running random software copy obtained at the farmers' market from under the blanket.

Re: The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

#44

Post by yyyk » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

There isn't a big difference between most AV and malware nowadays.

Both hog all your system resources, both send info about you to HQ, both spread often piggybacking on other software, both are hard-to-impossible to remove.

Re: The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

#45

Post by b212 » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 7:24 PM UTC

sneakernets wrote: post #21

xan92 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my personal and honest experience with Avast. They were the first scareware pioneers, If you have used them as I did you would have noticed.

Infecting machines with malware intentionally? They did this and are still allowed to sell product?

This is BS. They never did that.

Re: The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

#46

Post by notfromhere » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

philjohn wrote: post #41

rokalakt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Devs in the uk earn far more than most of these jobs you mentioned. Perhaps you are working with the wrong company.

There is quite a large difference between tech salaries depending on nationality of the company, their approach to tech and location in the UK. A Principal Software Engineer in the South East can make six figures easily, the same in the midlands will be much less, and that's only 90 miles apart.

That's a huge wage differential for a country the size of Michigan

Re: The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

#47

Post by julienreszka » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

mac_was wrote: post #4

'Baza wirusow zostala zaktualizowana' - in every Polish home 10 years ago.

It wasn't only in polish. We had this in French too. "La base virale VPS a été mise a jour" https://youtu.be/PMro9K5EM0s

Re: The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

#48

Post by fancyfish » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

Friendly reminder that free editions of Avast collect and sell[1] user clickstream data to one of Avast's companies, Jumpshot[2][3]. This "panel" includes 100m "online shoppers" and 20m app users, in total registering 5 billion clicks every day.

[1] https://martechtoday.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-p...

[2] https://www.jumpshot.com/

[3] https://press.avast.com/avast-software-acquires-jumpshot-to-...

Re: The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

#49

Post by indigodaddy » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

tardo99 wrote: post #13

Antivirus software is basically a scam.

Yeah, on Mac/Windows, I just install the free version of Malwarebytes and do a full scan occasionally...

Re: The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

#50

Post by tluyben2 » Thu, Sep 19, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

xan92 wrote: post #3

Around 2003/04 was installing Avast/AVG on my friends desktops/PCs was a wonderful freeware. I started working as a system administrator around 2007 when I did the same on a few office machines, I had noticed how they became rogue, By infecting healthy machines with malware and prompting to buy paid version for removal, I am not sure if anyone remembers this thing with Avast ?

They did not infect machines; they just popped up that it found all kinds of things that were not there at all and you should upgrade to fix the issue. That is also a rancid tactic but I think Norton (or Mcafee?) also did it (it has been a long time but I remember either or both of them trying to panic users into buying like that). After upgrading, it would scan and nothing would be found; or at least not what it said before upgrading.