Biden puts a bullet in Kaspersky: Sales, updates to be banned in America
theregister.com
theregister.com
Some percentage of customers won't bother to switch to a competing product, letting the stale signatures linger instead, and ironically that'll make them more vulnerable to hackers and state adversaries.
isn't this hypocrisy? on your part, i mean the HN crowd
That AV software has very poor performance. It significantly slows down the DLL/file loading. And the firewall component just simply add delay to all HTTP requests. The “Exclusion” function is also useless as expected. It cost me a lot of meaningless time to investigate the performance issue reported by customers.
And you cannot even imagine that as an AV software, their self-protection component is running as a simple Windows service. You can easily disable that by setting a wrong user account to that service. After restart, you can do whatever you want.
Honestly, if I am the one who writes virus. I would give credit to the company who make such poor antivirus software and sell to thousands of customers. They do make life easier.
It is a good line for the script in a second part of the movie with the same name. As a excuse to justify the banning of an Antivirus... weak as the Intelligence of some Chief Commander in the New World. Not a Big-EEndian. Swift...
This article talks about some possible reasons:
https://www.wired.com/story/us-kaspersky-ban-evidence/
> Stories in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have since cited anonymous sources accusing Kaspersky of siphoning American secrets, including the files of an NSA staffer, to its own servers, where the Russian government then accessed them.
To be clear, the article doesn't consider this a smoking gun, and instead is demanding a more concrete statement of the government's reasons.
But, personally, I'm completely fine with erring on the side of not trusting a security company operating in Russia with access to my computer. Let's say Kaspersky has the most honest and best intentions in the world, and would never voluntarily cooperate with Putin's government to spy on or harm foreign computers. Does anyone think their protests would matter at all, if push came to shove? This is like the TikTok argument, but with a more obvious attack vector if the software came under direct control of a hostile government.
And Russia is sanctioned by US in many other ways because Russia started a war against Ukraine. So why not sanction Russian software companies as well. Makes sense if you think starting wars should be discouraged.
IMO it is supply chain risk which ought to be carefully audited.
The founder and CTO is Durov, whose previous project, VKontakte (Facebook clone) has been effectively confiscated by Russian government.
Telegram is a Russian project. People are hoping that because it's made by a "good" Russian who isn't in Russia anymore, and holds a grudge against Russian government, Telegram won't have Russian backdoors.
I'd say, that is rather optimistic.
Critical one probably has.
>What does that mean for other countries?
That if they are involved in an armed conflict with the US, they would be better off not having US software where they don't want the US to have presence.
Which brings us to where we started: the reason for the ban is that Russia has invaded Ukraine and is waging war there, and the US isn't on Russia's side.
By the countries the US invaded, during the invasion - you bet.
>How about Israel?
I'm guessing Iran isn't a big user of Israeli software.
Conversely, the US and Israel are security partners.
How much mental gymnastics does one have to do to ignore the fact that the entire thing is about Russia waging a war in which the US is on the other side?
"Israel controls certain aspects of ..." would be somewhat more in the direction of a fair statement. But it's still not accurate. It's definitely quite fair to talk about something called the "Israel lobby", which by definition is made up of American citizens, and not even necessarily Jewish, which obviously does exert a great degree of control over, to be clear -- certain aspects of policy within the U.S.
But the Israeli government per se does not.
Though we may need to qualify that:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/24/israel...
How unusual.
Haaretz and the New York Times recently revealed that Chikli’s ministry had tapped a public relations firm to secretly pressure American lawmakers. The firm used hundreds of fake accounts posting pro-Israel or anti-Muslim content on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Instagram.
Posting content on social media is totally an example of checks notes[2]
>"Israel controls US foreign policy lock stock and barrel, and increasingly its domestic policy as well. If there ever was a threat to national security, this is it."
I am now absolutely convinced that Israel is an evil regime, very different from any other government on planet Earth.
To say otherwise is naive.