Nytimes has nowhere near the influence facebook does, and it’s way less unhealthy of a behavior as one of myriad similar sources. They average out to being harder to manipulate than facebook is.
I mean, software companies will spin ads any way they can to get engineers interested. That’s their prerogative. It doesn’t mean any of it is true—the world is 100% worse off due to ads, and no amount of smooth scrolling animations is going to change that.
EDIT: the official “kibibyte” was standardized in 1998: https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html so almost 20 years ago. Blame Windows and HDD mfgs for sticking with the SI definitions.
Windows (at least up to 8) does not follow the SI standard. It uses KB, MB, GB but converts using 1024. Which has funny consequences, like 999MB being smaller 0.94GB.
The nature of the relationship is unknown. Even if Kaspersky is bought by Putin in some way, it’s not clear what the terms and expectations are. It does seem unlikely that the commercial offering is straight up spyware for putin—why would anyone buy it? So it’s a little silly to talk about the relationship as if its existence is meaningful when the degree of ownership is the real question.
You're treating the question of "is Kaspersky spyware" in the sense of criminal law, requiring proof of guilt before enforcing punishment.
The grandparent was treating it in the sense of security analysis: requiring proof of safety before granting trust.
I know which paradigm I'd pick before installing an trusted piece of software that can literally snoop on the whole system. But, y'know, whatever. You be you.
Basically: almost the whole of the Russian economy has been subverted to serve the needs of Putin's government. What are the chances that Kaspersky alone has not? Seems low enough to maybe look elsewhere for your AV needs.
I am not sure I follow your line of reasoning. It is obvious that Kaspersky does not advertise itself in such a way, and the average consumer probably has no idea the company is even based out of Russia.
Who cares if Putin personally calls the shots to the leaders of the company? There are a thousand shades of grey, for instance: Kaspersky knowledgeably allowing backdoors about which they could later feign ignorance.
I don’t trust US, Chinese, or Russian software. Big companies with access to sensitive data invariably become targets, and are only allowed to exist peacefully with the blessing of their masters.
Do for their own good? I see this as for the collective good, as most of the people hurt by unpatched software are NOT microsoft but people, small businesses, and the victims of the resulting botnets.
Obviously if you know what this is you can turn it off.
This sort of subtle authoritarianism in the name of "security" is quite frankly extremely disturbing, and the companies are using it to force what they want by bundling plenty of other highly disruptive and completely-non-security changes too. I could go into a more political direction here, but looking at some of the other changes that have happened to society in general lately, I'm not surprised at all. Disappointed, but not surprised.
I mean, I’d rather just not have internet connected devices at all. But the internet is a commons, and people who don’t patch ruin it for everyone.
But, there’s a difference between auto update by default and forced updates. And there’s, again, the option of buying the same thing with no internet connection—pretty much nothing you own needs to be connected to the internet at all.
The issue with having an off switch is that non-tech-savvy people will blindly follow some instructions to disable it and will get caught by a major security vuln.
Case in point: when Chrome throws a TLS error, you could type "danger" to bypass it, but they had to change it because businesses started teaching users to bypass errors blindly.
Not exactly apples to apples, but similar enough in my mind. If users blindly disable updates, they won't be updated when there's a major security patch.
A good reminder that if a software company is given enough trust to auto update, keeping that trust us important. Seems the big boys have been breaching that trust a lot lately.
This is true. But i’m ok with stupidity hurting individuals—at least in terms of compromise—i’m less ok with default settings being potentially insecure one day.
