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I was doing Mac drivers about a decade ago, and some of the dumbest and most ignorant questions on the kernel and drivers mailing lists came from A/V folks. Things like "my machine locks up when our software does X", where it was clear that X was blocking the entire kernel waiting for a userpace thread. Ugh.

I've resolved to never, ever run A/V software on any machine I control based on the quality of those devs.

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because A/V folks are hackers, not engineers. hackers do impressive things without reading the fucking manual. that's why they can break seemingly unbreakable things. but on the surface, to the engineer, they seem uncompetent.

how do you "secure" machines if they are windows ones and dumb people plugin flash drives and click on big shiny download ram buttons. genuinely curious.

One way to do it is to whitelist all binaries in the system, and sandbox all applications (to prevent chances of a malicious PDF/image/etc abusing a buggy application).

can you do that on windows? every single exe, every process?

Yeah, the security policies let you do that. I think the current mechanism is called AppLocker.

Note that there may be still ways to bypass it if you're an attacker sitting at the computer, rather than a hapless user.

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