https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/ftc-bans-avast-selling-customers-sensitive-browsing-data/
Avast closed its Jumpshot subsidiary in 2020 after the antivirus giant was caught selling the browsing activity of millions of its customers.
I don't understand why companies who commit blatant fraud like this aren't required to disgorge all fraudulently earned money. If someone defrauds banks they get fined based on their earnings in a way that hurts. If someone defrauds consumers for "tens of millions of dollars" they are only fined $16M.
Well, actually I do understand, I just don't like it and don't like what it says about this country's priorities.
By New York state law you are, any "ill gotten gains" must be surrendered. And the fine accumulates interest during any appeals to boot. it's why Trump is getting his nearly half a billion dollar fine. I wish all fraud laws were that way though. I believe most are typically based on common law fraud, and usually there's some kind of flat fine and the the rest is based off provable damages to other parties, rather than the amount of profit.
I remember a long time ago when Avast came highly recommended, at least back when I had gone looking for reviews. Back when antivirus was still more or less a necessity.
The whole don't be an idiot thing doesn't work well with most people. Most people just gøøg|€ everything and most likely don't have a clue when they're being sent to fake sites that will give them viruses. And some of them will even see macrohard defender essentially saying "Hey! You Fucked Up!" and ignore it because they surely know better than a computer.
I personally like to think that computer literacy right now is similar to back when people were just starting to push for everyone to be literate. Big difference is phones destroying that effort for computer literacy by oversimplifying everything.
I haven't run anything other than free Windows defender since it was available I believe in Windows 7. Never had a virus or anything malicious. Don't download files that you don't know the source of. Don't click on mystery links. Don't visit insecure websites. And as mentioned, keep your system up to date and you'll be fine.
Yeah people act like it’s so easy to get a virus but if you’re even remotely competent it’s pretty easy to avoid
I worked geek squad for years. The vast majority of malware was people downloading free games or free software and then not checking the custom install settings to uncheck the "install McAfee security scanner" or whatever toolbar and redirection it was at the time.
Never had a virus or anything malicious.
That you know about.
Don't assume you are fine just because your antivirus doesn't alert you about viruses.
This goes for every AV, not just Defender.
That being said, I am also just using Defender snd it has worked well.
I used to run F-Secure, and I like it, but eh Defender is good enough.
I now only run Linux, but that's a change within the last 4ish months. Prior to that I was in Windows. And I work as a sysadmin and our network it all Windows on defender, granted, paid Defender and other security.
Defender + common sense usually works as long as youre not using it like a public library.
Browser data being sold by Microsoft. Which browser? Edge, built on a platform that isn't Microsoft's? I get that you don't like Microsoft but this is just slander based off nothingness. Please give 1 shred of evidence other than "Microsoft bad".
I remember when Avast was considered the least shit or at least, one of the less shit options for Antivirus. Pretty much seems all those antivirus products are just malware with marketing teams now.
Or: use linux and don't be a dumbass. I know, it sounds elitist, but I've been around a long, long time on the internet and I probably haven't used antivirus this millennia and the only problem I've ever had was one kodi addon mining bitcoin (inside a sandboxed environment).
Linux users keep saying you don't need antivirus on Linux and that Linux is more secure and safe. This intrigues me, as I'm moving to Linux, but I never hear any technical reasons as to why this would be. All I see is "there are no viruses because it's a small platform". That's not an argument for the security of the platform so I'm curious to know if there are any technical reasons Linux would be more secure. Every now and then I read about some malware for Linux, so they do definitely exist.
The underlying user/group systems are a little more secure, containerization is common and easy (flatpak, bubblewrap, and firejail), the attack surface is lower, the marketshare is smaller, and repositories are fundamentally superior. Of these, app repositories and the market share are by far the biggest factors.
Getting malware on Linux isn't totally unheard of, but it is extremely uncommon. I've never had any, nor has anyone I know. This guy isn't the first person I've heard of getting malware on Linux, but he is one of very, very few.
one added benefit of Linux: It doesn't - on a default installation - enable tons of services the user will probably never need. These services on Windows listen on the internet connection for incoming requests (e.g. remote desktop service), or are available locally for other exploits.
One of the reasons Windows "just works" (well...) is because literally EVERYTHING is preconfigured and activated on startup. That's also one of the reasons why the system is such a resource hogging piece of work...
It's a work of hours to manually go through system services and identify & disable everything you will not need.
All I see is "there are no viruses because it's a small platform".
It's also a total lie. Do you know how many Linux servers there are in the world? It's a lot. Same for Android devices.
While these aren't quite the same, and thus not the same vulnerabilities as desktop Linux, they do provide some insights into the effectiveness of its security model.
It's not the case that viruses can't exist on Linux, it's just very improbable through normal usage. The key difference is that the overwhelming majority of software installed on Linux is through a package manager, which is a tool that downloads software from a maintained, trusted, and vetted repository of software. So instead of googling "Firefox download", clicking on (hopefully) the right link (and getting this right gets harder and harder with Google fucking up search results), and downloading the software from the website, you simply execute a command in your terminal like apt install firefox (for Debian-based systems, command can vary by distro you're using) and it pulls the software from a trusted repository. This alone eliminates the most common attack vectors, since usually Windows users get viruses by downloading random executables off the internet.
Generally, the way you get viruses on a Linux system are through finding/exploiting vulnerabilities in software which is very hard to pull off generally and are usually resolved fairly quickly once they're discovered (And of course, Linux is not unique in this respect, any computer can be target of such attacks).
Haven't looked to see if there are other replies yet, but the primary reason, back when I ditched windows completely 20+ years ago, was that the worst that could happen with linux malware or a 'virus' would be the user's home directory becoming compromised. Due to posix permissions they would have no ability to take down your entire system as would happen with windows pretty much all the time if you clicked the wrong button on a pop-up. I still have to use windows for work and from what I see (and from the successful ransomware attacks that have happened due to people opening an email attachment) I can't imagine that has changed a lot.
If you set up system backups of user directories then the damage could be mitigated relatively quickly and easily. These days with flatpaks and browsers (well, firefox at least) having built-in and by-default sandboxing then even your home directory is pretty safe.
There's little technical reason, at least no security features were ever tested on the scale Windows is every day.
The real reason is nobody bothers to target Linux desktop users because there's dozens of us (dozens!) while there's billions of Windows users. It's about efficiently spending your money and time while investing into crime.
between smartphones replacing desktop PCs and mac computers, I doubt that there's "billions" of windows users left in reality.
I didn't, but I considering the world's workforce is around 3 1/2 billion people, and that in the developed world, the percentage of office jobs is around or below 50%, however the majority of the world's work force live in underdeveloped parts of the world, I would estimate the total number of worldwide office workspaces to be significantly below a billion. And - even the number Microsoft themselves claim, appears to be only 1.5 billion total per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems - with this particular quote in the article (emphasis by me):
On 27 January 2016, Paul Thurrott summarized the operating system market, the day after Apple announced "one billion devices":
Apple's "active installed base" is now one billion devices. [..] Granted, some of those Apple devices were probably sold into the market place years ago. But that 1 billion figure can and should be compared to the numbers Microsoft touts for Windows 10 (200 million, most recently) or Windows more generally (1.5 billion active users, a number that hasn’t moved, magically, in years), and that Google touts for Android (over 1.4 billion, as of September). My understanding of iOS is that the user base was previously thought to be around 800 million strong, and when you factor out Macs and other non-iOS Apple devices, that's probably about right. But as you can see, there are three big personal computing platforms.
I think it's fair to say that "billionS" is a bit of an exaggeration - that's all I meant to point out.
240 million PCs were shipped last year, with about 10% being Apple. A negligible number run Linux. If we assume 5 years average life, that's still easily a billion active Windows devices.
That said, devices may not be the best metric. You mentioned users, which may use many devices. For instance, I use a Windows laptop at work, Windows desktop at home, Android on my phone.
I would use web server metrics, which are an approximate indicator of time spent on each OS.
I believe the yearly tally from some company aggregating website traffic came out a few months back and linux had climbed over 4% of desktop usage. Linux gamers have outnumbered mac users on steam for close to a year now.
As I said, I took issue with the plural in billionS :) that typically implies "more than two" when it's likely to be closer to 1.
For instance, I use a Windows laptop at work, Windows desktop at home
poor you :)
I think it's the "don't be a dumbass" that's important, not the OS choice really. I haven't had a 3rd party virus scanner in at least a decade on Windows and have never had a virus or malware.
Fakespot's entire thing seems to be being a cringy AI tool. I feel like whoever uses it should/would understand that this data is leaving their grasp.
Make sure to check your Firefox about:config for "shopping2023" or whatever flag they called it... Soon we'll all have Fakespot installed
This is where I got the screenshot from:
https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy
Here's the internal meta-ticket on shopping2023, along with some stuff on fetching ads from servers
And here's their announcement:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/fakespot-joins-mozilla-firefox-shopping-announcement/
(Before Mozilla bought this company, its privacy policy was changed to allow transfer of private data upon sale -- all of it, not just the training model. Here's the old policy for comparison to their April 25 version; 7 days later Mozilla made the acquisition announcement)
I haven't used any antivirus on Windows since 2008, generally doing whatever I want and just not being stupid about it, and I've had no issues.
If you're gonna pay for Antivirus, shout out to ESET NOD32.
They have gotten a bit expensive though. I'm buying a 1 year sub for $10 on Black Friday.
