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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Yes - but not for hostile purposes, but because your own company's antivirus won't let you mail an executable to a colleague.

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Usually this. Or in my workplace, an image.

Antivirus are some crazy shit that may trigger on any random action and will teach people to follow the most unsafe procedures without questioning, so they can get anything done.

I've heard it put this way: If you force users to trade convenience for security, they will find a way to obtain convenience at the expense of security.

> If you force users to trade convenience for security

I _wish_ it was better security they were making the trade for. It often isn't though. These programs are large, expensive, and don't do much most of the time. I feel there's a perverse incentive for developers to make their AV products as noisy as is possible to justify their own existence.

And yet.. even with full AV rollouts locked down at the highest level, bad actors still get into networks and exploit them. So, to me it feels like our users are trading away their convenience for our misguided CYA policies.

There was that one AV with a JS interpreter running as root

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22544554

The truth is, you don't need much in the way of AV software if you are willing to outright block certain types of files.

In most large corporations you are basically not allowed to send anything that could even potentially hide a virus except for maybe Office files (nobody yet built a compelling alternative to Powerpoint and Excel).

Typical rules already block all executable binaries, scripts and password protected archives (because they could hold binaries or scripts), etc. As a Java developer I have recently discovered my company started blocking *.java files.

My guess/fear is that most AV software gets deployed because some insurance policy requires you to tick that box.

A lot of this stuff (AV software) is getting deployed at all different layers of the environment. Firewalls are getting better at dynamic file analysis and file blocking, the endpoints are loaded with user behavior/analytics, av and dlp tools. AV is so omnipresent because it's in a decent amount netsec appliances these companies stand up

If you make it harder for people to do the right thing than the wrong thing, they will choose the wrong thing.

This has been brought up a million times in the context of DRM, but it is true in the general case as well.

I could be mistaken on this, but wasn't this basically the sales pitch for Spotify? Basically saying "you'll never get rid of piracy, but you can compete with it".

Not sure about Spotify, but I know gabe newell had famously made basically this argument, in regards to steam's success

This was the sales pitch for iTunes and the iTunes store:

"We approached it as 'Hey, we all love music.' Talk to the senior guys in the record companies and they all love music, too. … We love music, and there's a problem. And it's not just their problem. Stealing things is everybody's problem. We own a lot of intellectual property, and we don't like when people steal it. So people are stealing stuff and we're optimists. We believe that 80 percent of the people stealing stuff don't want to be; there’s just no legal alternative. So we said, Let's create a legal alternative to this. Everybody wins. Music companies win. The artists win. Apple wins. And the user wins because he gets a better service and doesn't have to be a thief."

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a11177/steve-jobs-esqu...

Another point of reference: because they had no legal ground to stand on, HBO targeted Canadian torrenters of Game of Thrones with an e-mail saying, among other things, "It's never been easier to [watch Game of Thrones legally]!"

This was true, it had never been easier. It had also never been harder. For the entire time that Game of Thrones was being aired, the only legal way for Canadians to watch it was to pay about a hundred dollars per month for cable and the cable packages that would give them HBO. You could buy it on iTunes, but only as a season, after the season was over.

So yeah, I kept torrenting it, everyone I know kept torrenting it, and everyone hated (or laughed at, or both) HBO the whole time.

Interesting that it depends so much on region.

Here in the UK, Sky offer a cheap 'over-the-top' streaming alternative to their satellite offerings, [0] so you could watch Game of Thrones for £8/month, provided you didn't mind the inferior video quality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_TV_(Sky)

They have a "topup" now which allows you to get real, full-fat 1080p.

Woohoo!

I did actually add that to my subscription, and during lockdown have used it to re-watch Game of Thrones :)

I gave that a go but wasn't impressed by the 1080P quality. I suspect they're using a low bitrate.

Most likely. You can get the bitrate to display (when the video controls are up maybe?) if you wanted to take a look.

Between that and whatever magic my OLED tv was doing, it looked pretty good to me.

Just a shame they haven't released it all in 4K/UHD yet...

I doubt they'll offer 4K. They want to push people toward their expensive satellite packages for that.

I meant HBO! I think GoT season 1 is the only season that's had a release at that res so far.

I was really hoping to get an HDR version of the "The long night", to address some of the banding and other visibility problems present in the episode, and maybe see a bit more of what went on. But there isn't one yet. So I watched it with the lights out so that my eyes adjusted :)

But yeah, you're probably right, NowTv has massive potential to undercut their main offering.

This was also a sales pitch for Steam – especially in developing countries where the whole concept of paying for non-physical things was a hard sell.

(Though in this case it wasn't just competition – access to official servers in online games was something that was often not pirateable.)

It's true, and often it's not laziness - corporate security measures are often focused only on denying access, and they're so overbearing that, were they followed to the letter, they could easily shut the company down. It's through workarounds that actual work gets done.

Sounds like a large organizational incentive intergration failure where subpieces are at odds such that they care more about dodging blame and outside of their domain it isn't their problem. "Not My Fault/Not My Problem" as a toxic approach making balancing decisions worse.

I remember having issues with a corporate email system where base64/uuencoded data would fail to get through with a very rough dependency on size - large files had a smaller chance of getting through but it was clear that there wasn't a hard size limit. Eventually someone twigged that the problem was a "rude word" scanner, and that beyond a certain size you would hit the "scunthorpe" problem, and forbidden words would appear in the ASCII text randomly.

The thing is, usability is security. People will do anything to be able to do their job (because people like being able to, you know, eat and stuff). Things that stop you doing your job are bad for security.

I wish more of the security industry would get their frigging heads around this. PGP did less for messaging security over decades of availability than iMessage and Signal did in a few weeks of availability.

Antiviruses will quarantine compiler output...

At one company, Symantec would also quarantine the compiler and build system. It certainly made builds exciting to have the antivirus playing Russian roulette with the entire toolchain.

Of course many places have replaced dopey AV with creepier advanced tools like ATP or CrowdStrike.

Every time I went to configure a toolchain on Jetbrains' CLion, Cmake would create some test files and compile them. Windows Defender deleted every file and even the embedded toolchain. Fun :)

This 100%. I recall many a fun night at $BIGCORP burning the midnight oil, receiving the warning emails that my "unauthorised software" had been reported to my manager, and that it had been quarantined away for my own safety and convenience. Given that $BIGCORP was a tech firm my manager would be intensely delighted that they would receive regular midnight notifications that I was doing my job. Whatever that damn thing cost it would have been cheaper to let the malware do its thing.

Windows development seems to be fun as of recently. Didn't touch it for couple of decades.

Sometimes I think that modern Windows is a nice platform already, even comfortable. (Like, you know, C++17 is very unlike C++98.) But then I'm reminded of the necessity to run an antivirus in front of it in a corporate environment.

We have to have antivirus on our Linux computers for compliance.

Yes such a thing exists... https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-us/products/virusscan-e...

There are legitimate use cases for anti virus on Linux, for instance when running mail or file servers.

Aren't those scanning for Windows Viruses?

Some can be cross-platform JS exploits.

There was a discussion in our IT Security department about how to install McAfee on CoreOS servers. (For the uninitiated, CoreOS is a Linux distribution that comes without a package manager. It's intended as a base to run containers on, so you would deploy all software via container images.)

I remember someone suggesting to put McAfee into a fully isolated container that only exposes the port where it reports compliance, allowing it to scan itself to death all day long.

I intensely dislike corporate "security product" culture. For whatever reason, every IT department thinks that you have to ruin Windows with tons of invasive antivirus and monitoring software. I've seen zero evidence that these performance-killing tools are necessary. It's all theater. Microsoft itself doesn't do this shit to Windows, and neither should anyone else.

Ugh, welcome to my life.

"You must exclude our program sub directory because temporary files are created containing interpreted code and your antivirus will ether block it outright, or lock the file so long you get application time outs"

Let’s call a spade a spade.

Antivirus software is malware.

In February, I e-mailed a python script to one of our developers to help debug an issue with their SSL configuration.

Two days ago, I needed the script again but couldn't find it. Went to our e-mail thread and it said "the following potentially malicious attachments were blocked", showing mine, but... even from my outgoing mailbox? That seems ridiculous and problematic, considering that it sent fine at the time.

I know that e-mail shouldn't be used as a replacement for Sharepoint or Dropbox or whatever, and I should have a local copy of what I need, but it just seems annoying and arbitrary.

Anyway, I just logged into Outlook Web and downloaded it from the message there. Problem solved.

This has happened to me with gmail. Zipfiles I had sent in the past are no longer allowed to be downloaded from my sent items folder through the standard interface.

If I had to deploy AV for mail, I would absolutely scan outgoing mail as well. Imagine if some compromised mail account in my org sends malware to accounts in other companies. These companies could then sue my company for negligence if they can show that we did not scan our mail for viruses on outbound (which could potentially be done by examining mail headers).

(I am not a lawyer.)

Your company's antivirus, or GMail. A binary? A zip with a binary? Nuh-uh.

To be fair, emailing binaries (apart from known types such as images, PDFs, etc.) is a rare enough use case for legitimate purposes and an easy enough way of spamming malware to clueless random people that it's probably a reasonable default for gmail.

Having an option to allow them might be okay though. (I barely use gmail so I don't know if it has one or not.)

Ah you must be young...

for not using gmail? The hooked me in school

He means there used to be a time when people would mail binaries to each other more often, before they got too big and DRM'ed for that.

There was also a time when alt.binaries was a thing (technically not email, but usenet is pretty similar)

For not sending binaries by email - there is no shame to being young in this case as it means never developing the bad habits.

Before Dropbox and similiar it was far more a norm and various file sharing systems like SharePoint may wind up not actually used. Non-computer technical people often do so in companies all the time and practically use it as an ersatz version control system to the cringe of IT.

This WebRTC p2p file transfer has been a revelation for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23023675

We "thankfully" have shared folders we can use to drop stuff to specific users.

But most of our software lives on a RDP server anyways.

I use vmdk’s

Seriously I don’t know how long it’ll last but a zip file into a fat32 disk image in a vmdk got through just fine.

The bonus is that 7zip can extract from vmdk.

We just rename our files with .novirus on the end. I assume the main point is to stop executables from outside running with a click, or internal forwards of the same by compromised users which is why it's so easy to bypass.

Shouldn’t you put it in either eg artifactory or a code repo?

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