I literally just cancelled my McAfee subscription because of annoying constant pop-ups like this. At least this one from Microsoft is a legal notice. McAfee constantly spams you to turn on unnecessary features, and even changes settings periodically to turn things on like “browser monitoring”. Literally worse than old school pop-up viruses.
More importantly, it also never caught a single thing. Windows Defender does fine. My buddy in cyber security suggested them for safety despite how bad they are, but I can honestly recommend you should never, ever, get it. Just keep backups and be prepared to nuke your system if needed, and save yourself a pop-up every other day.
I recently made the mistake of installing Avast, and it does the same annoying garbage. The actual settings are buried under a metric shit ton of “Did you know that…?” pop-ups that appear every single time no matter how often you select “do not show me this again”, and it constantly urges you to buy the “premium” version for extra features that are literally useless to me.
And it was a pain to uninstall as well. Some files survived the official Avast uninstall AND separate uninstall from the Task Manager, and messed with the Windows Defender, which was unable to recieve updates for a while until I found and nuked the hidden residue of Avast.
Does your buddy in cybersecurity solve most of his problems by reinstalling Adobe Acrobat and restarting, and if that doesn’t work, muttering about hackers and walking away? Because John McAfee himself didn’t recommend using what the software bearing his name became and was more likely to put a bullet through his PC than install that shit.
While he was living, I don’t think his bullets were most likely to go through another human, but I do believe he was living on a boat because he had to flee Belize (I think?) because we was wanted for murder and couldn’t return to the US because he was wanted for various things there, too (probably including that murder because it was an American).
His advice is only relevant here because his name is on the software, not because he was a good role model. Fascinating guy, but not one to look up to.
Sounds like some people I’ve encountered who really don’t know shit, and have just survived on the ignorance and impressionability of others they con into paying/employing them. Then they just Google every problem they’re tasked with fixing.
Could be. I had the same objections, and brought up how I thought Norton and McAfee were supposed to be garbage. His take was that McAfee had cleaned their act up and was best in class in addition to Windows Defender. I mentioned elsewhere but he’s in the Intelligence Community so he may have reasons he can’t tell me, or just looking at different attack vectors than your average sysadmin. I’ll ask him.
Oh man I totally forgot about this, thanks for the ping.
He said:
“Reasoning? Sigs are only as good as their aperture. McAfee is on a lot of a boxes, catching stuff and creating new sigs. They also have a large staff of very talented people out there finding stuff and creating sigs.
The app does annoyingly keep trying to upsell you. Do they say why it sucks or is it just contempt for the company?”
Which is a valid question. I didn’t actually see anyone say why it sucks here. Literally everyone just said he’s dumb and outdated, when his original advice to me was:
“McAfee is an industry leader. Not bloatware anymore. Can buy for all your devices including phone (one purchase). Defender is excellent. No one solution is better than layered defense. I run defender, McAfee, and fireeye. Malwarebytes is good [this was in response to my earlier question], but you get what you pay for. Kaspersky is sus enough that it’s not permitted on usg or contractor machines. John is insane and may have killed someone. He’ll be found dead with a hooker and enough coke to take down an elephant.”
Then months later when I bitched about paying for it and asked if I really needed it, he said I had to get it because the signatures come out weekly.
So actually curious what other people think. I’ll link this comment to other people who pooh-poohed it and ask why.
He’s in the IC (and so is the other guy who recommended it), so less “sysadmin best practices” and more “stopping state actors” practices, so maybe that has something to do with it. I’ll tell him the Internet thinks he’s wrong and see what he says. He definitely wasn’t saying it was great at the time, just that it was needed in addition to Defender and was way safer than Kaspersky which is basically spyware.
The US intelligence community, or a subset thereof, apparently.
I have no idea his personal skill level or knowledge, but without putting him on blast I know his company has been involved in big stuff. He could theoretically focus more on a different aspect of security and have got this part wrong, I don’t know the details of his job very much by design.
I know that’s a solution, but as a solution to bad design it’s a little bit “Just wear a rubber glove to stop your oven electrocuting you”. Yeah sure, but maybe design it better?
What they actually probably saved was needing to design a whole separate engine case for each bike in their lineup to match all their exhaust configurations.
The idea of having a little pipe protruding out is a different kind of bad design. Things that poke out from engine cases tend to snag or get punched in during a crash, turning what would be some scrapes on the block into a completely totaled engine.
A genuine question if you would like please, I know you meant warm oil for easy maneuvering (oil moves faster when warm/hot), but what about hot oil? Is it safe to change motorcycle oil after an hour or more ride when the oil might be toi hot?
A co-worker of mine tried adding water to his car reservoir after he just stopped from a long ride, the water was near boiling point and it blowed up on him the moment he opened tha water reservoir (not sure that is the correct name). Can such a thing happens with oil exchange?
Oil doesn’t expand and steam like water, so no that won’t happen, but hot oil leads to very nasty burns and can melt gloves onto your hands. Most bikes run the oil around 200 degrees. So no it isn’t safe to change hot oil. Don’t do that.
And, specifically because oil doesn’t boil at those temperatures, it can be at much higher temperature than water can be as a liquid.
We tend to have a mental model of how much damage water can do at its “max” temperature, because liquid water stops existing after a certain temp.
But oil can be so much hotter than that, and still just be a liquid. It’s dangerous in that way, because while a drop of water at near boiling can only do so much damage but a drop of oil can be holding a lot more heat and hence cook a lot more of your flesh before it runs equalizes with the surroundings
Plus people know you mean business when you’ve got some foil.
Guy pulls over his car and brings out the the lug wrench, okay fine. He’s gonna change that tire. Let’s hope he doesn’t forget to chock the wheels, but he’s got the idea.
But you see a dude pullin reynolds wrap out of his bags next to a motorcycle on the off-ramp, that’s a serious dude. That’s the kind of dude you give that dude a burger when he walks by. That’s all I’m sayin.
Keep replacing the ones you’re using with the latest iteration
I mean, a lawyer’s gonna disallow that I’m pretty sure but that’s how we’d be designing new bikes at DaVinci Crater if I were over there. I’ll stay on the low sec roads, I know it needs major design certification before anyone can take it on the nice roads
Should be, but prototyping and making one offs is expensive, maybe even 100x the cost of mass production per unit, so they will of course be looking to do the minimal amount possible
This is the sort of thing the law can’t keep up with. Markets do this better. I bet someone could make a “no ui bullshit” certification and then websites could display a little badge. Like LEED, but for websites and with regard to protecting the user’s sanity and trust.
I can’t even imagine what pernicious elements they can add to it to bog down someone’s website too. They don’t even have to introduce it on purpose, if it’s just a byproduct they can shrug and not worry about it. It’s shocking how much traffic you lose if your website takes three seconds to load.
KDE Connect is also available through Google Play and most likely signed with a different key as the F-Droid Version. Since Play Protect checks the App signatures, it probably detected this discrepancy and determined the App was fake. Not really an Assholedesign as this is a valid concern if a normal user downloads an app from the internet.
On the other hand it’s a valid case to have the app installed by means other than the play store. I can’t imagine they have found this discrepancy in signatures for the first time.
You can actually sign the F-Droid app yourself, if you use reproducible builds.
There’s reasonable odds the signatures still won’t match though, because Google requires App Bundles now, and then they build and sign the APK, rather than allowing the developer to build and sign their own APK.
Technically you can use the same key (see “Best Practices” of this page), but it’s kind of shady, and requires giving your private key to Google.
It could just ask before removing shit. Remove the permissions, freeze the app, prompt the user to confirm they meant to install it from somewhere other than the playstore. Hell, since it can detect F-Droid is installed, maybe use some context clues and ask the user to confirm this app was installed from there?
More importantly, can you tell it to ignore certain apps? I don’t know, I’ve had Play Protect turned off forever. If not, that’s absolutely asshole design.
Hilariously, Google Play Protect is one of the worst tools on Android at detecting malware and triggering false positives, and consistently scores poorly in independent tests like AV-Test and AV-Comparatives. You can find links to these tests on the AMTSO website.
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