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Comment by cbdwqio | Hacker News Reader

Simply banning the language because the language is efficient and elegant to be used for malware is ridiculous.

That would be extremely stupid and shortsighted from them, to the point it makes one wonder it could be intentional. In the late 90s and early 2Ks a lot of cracking software, keygens etc. were made in Delphi, which i also used for years at different companies, and I don't recall a single antivirus complaining about executables compiled by me or any other colleague.

I suspect it's just an over-fitting problem. By some (likely ML-derived) metrics, Go and Nim binaries don't look like MSVC binaries.

My general feeling is that we're going to see many years of ML over-fitting for common cases, getting power users banned from various services, various oddball binaries flagged as malicious, etc.

Like most ills today, it's a not-caring-about-externalities problem. If there were real repercussions for rampant false positives, these would be fixed yesterday.

The thing is, these probably aren't rampant. I doubt more than 0.01% of all Windows machines have a Go or Nim binary on them.

False positives doen't just affect Go or Nim binaries, they affect anything that doesn't look exacty like the bloated shit MSVC spits out. It would affect a lot more real programs if their creators hadn't wasted time (and sometimes made their programs worse) to work around bs black box detections.

Assuming technical mistakes reflect intentional policy is kind of conspiratorial.

Far more likely that some ML algorithm trained on malware found the same patterns in legit software, all without any particular knowledge of source language.

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