Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see false positive rates in addition to false negative rates. In my experience, SmartScreen just labels 90% of everything as malware. The false positive rate is important because if the filter is usually wrong users will learn to just ignore it.

View on HN

SmartScreen is basically a reputation system. If not enough people have downloaded it and it's not known as a threat yet, it chooses to do the default thing and blocks it. That is probably what causes the behavior you referred to. But would you rather let a non-technical person not download a valid binary or let them download a malware?

It depends. If the non-technical person is so frustrated by SmartScreen being wrong all the time that they simply turn it off, or are instructed to turn it off by sites distributing legitimate binaries slandered by SmartScreen, then it's not a net win for security.

so are you saying its better to let download a (not so commonly downloaded) binary than to warn about it? Thank god you don't work on security software

Personal insults are unnecessary. What I'm saying is, a filter that prevented you from downloading anything would score 100% on this test. That doesn't make it more secure, because users would just disable it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com