Windows users have recently begun mass-reporting that Microsoft's Defender antivirus program, which is integrated into Windows 10 and 11 by default, is
Me too !! Been loving Ubuntu the last couple of months. Had very few issues other than one time my Gui stopped working and it would only boot into terminal, if anyone knows how to fix that it would be great incase it happens again . Last time I just did a fresh install.
If we define malware as something having functions to harm the user and not only things build soley for this purpose, then of course Windows is malware.
I've run into antiviruses blocking code I've written just because I pulled in certain cryptographic libs. Literally pulling in some Microsoft cryptography libraries in c# made it think I was writing a crypto locker.
This is a bad response to this news. There are many reasons why you might want to run tor on Windows and gatekeeping people out of tor because they are not on a chosen OS is a terribly way to get more people into thinking about privacy and security practices. Yes if you have the highest threat model you might want to avoid Windows as well, but not everyone needs absolute privacy/security for what they do. But why should you not have access to a tool that can help improve things even if you are not able to switch everything to a more private/secure alternative?
Really you should want everyone and anyone to run on tor, even if they don't need it, even if they are on windows. The more people using it the more secure it is for those that do require it.
Yeah I agree. To be clear, if you take the reverse of my statement, i.e. if you're on Windows, you shouldn't use Tor, then I would be gatekeeping.
But I'm not implying that, but rather the reverse. I'm saying if you have use Tor for whatever reasons to bypass censorship, do illegal stuff and avoid being tracked, you should at least be aware that at the kernel level, how you're accessing the internet has already been compromised by Microsoft, and consider alternatives OSes
Of course I'd still want people running Windows to be able to use Tor, and also I'd say leaving Windows isn't something you would only do at the "highest threat model".
Privacy will almost always be a trade-off with convenience, I'm pushing the awareness to get people to act, should they choose to. That's all.
someone is giving them money and rewarding the fuckery - and has been for several decades now.
i wish the MS benefactors would at least make the payments conditional on improvement.
I'd love to switch, but my laptop makes that quite hard and the computer still has years in it before I probably need to think about replacing it.
I've got an asus rog and sometimes need the backlight on the keyboard. As far as I could tell, no one had figured out how to do it without the windows only asus made software.
I keep a small partition set aside in case I need it for settings, but I leave the keyboard on one setting all the time.
Fedora by far has the best bootloader setup for modern bleeding edge hardware. Their Anaconda system (not related to Python's "conda") uses a shim key that is signed by Microsoft's 3rd party UEFI key signing arrangement. Outside of the questionable philosophical implications around this arrangement and system, overall the setup is ideal for the end user. Fedora can on coexist with a windows partition easily, encrypt the entire thing and Windows can't mess with anything on the Linux side. Personally, I haven't ever actually used Windows since W8. My workstation router runs on a whitelist firewall so W11 is in a post internet age where it rightfully belongs. It might as well be a tab in the UEFI bootloader settings for all I care.
Fedora also has a system that builds the Nvidia kernel module from scratch every time the Linux kernel is updated. Around half of the updates still require me to do a quick restart after initial boot to enable the Nvidia kernel module. It falls back to the open source alt driver and still works fine, but I do AI stuff and need the CUDA API, so I have to reboot to get that working once a week or two. Fedora really is quite easy now. I would use something like NIX, but the Anaconda system is unmatched and too good to give up. You will have secure boot locked all the time even if you can not register custom keys or do not care to set them up manually.
FWIW I just put Windows onto a ROG GX531GX to gift it to a family member, (I told him it was a testament of my love that I was going from Linux TO Windows on a system for the first time ever) but have been gaming on it under Linux for a couple of years, and under KDE plasma was a slider for the keyboard backlight with the power settings, which required no extra attention from me (that I can recall) to get there.
I may have had to install an "asus laptop" or similar labeled package from my package manager and forgotten about it, but it was for sure no more than that or I'd have remembered.
Edit: I'm posting this from a different computer but it was likely one of these.
It blows my mind that Windows can be and is so incompetent. If they did not hold the level of market share that they do, that would be out of business.
People are literally locked in because the software is not made for Linux. But Linux keeps marching and getting better.
We have the games, now all we need are a few professional applications and then Windows can easily be replaced.
A little context, one of the larger exit nodes was compromised and would send malware to your computer. The behavior shield probably caught this and correctly marked the program as a trojan, since, by definition, that's literally what it was acting as when connected to that node. More advanced AVs (like malwarebytes) will instead block the malicious connection rather than blanket-banning the entire program.
Hot take, I see no issue with this. If you're savvy enough to know about Tor and its purpose, you're also savvy enough to know how to add a security exclusion in Defender. People who don't know how to whitelist a program in Defender probably did not install Tor themselves and won't be safe using a program with the capability to access the dark web.
It's extra frustration for those trying to legitimately use Tor, but it's also a safety check in the case of an unintended install.
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False positives happen and it seems like they already resolved it.
It's unfortunate that MS makes it so hard to take them at their word when they're so aggressive with forcing Edge down everyone's throat. That makes even obvious bugs seem nefarious.