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Kaspersky Files Antitrust Complaint Against Microsoft Over Disabling Its Antivirus Software (bloomberg.com)
Russian security software maker Kaspersky Lab has filed antitrust complaints against Microsoft with the European Commission and the German federal cartel office, it said in a statement on Tuesday. From a report: Kaspersky sent a formal complaint to European Union and German antitrust regulators, saying "hurdles" created by Microsoft limit consumer choice and drive up the cost of security software. "With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft started to create obstacles to competing manufacturers of security solutions, and introduce different ways of pushing users to forgo third-party software in favor of its own Windows Defender," Moscow-based Kaspersky said in a statement. In a statement, Eugene Kaspersky said, "We see clearly -- and are ready to prove -- that Microsoft uses its dominant position in the computer operating system (OS) market to fiercely promote its own -- inferior -- security software (Windows Defender) at the expense of users' previously self-chosen security solution. Such promotion is conducted using questionable methods, and we want to bring these methods to the attention of the anti-competition authorities."
It's amusing history at this point. It once was a serious problem. But after what happened a couple weeks ago, it obviously still is a very big problem.
To its credit Microsoft, years ago, got very serious about security. And I applaud them for it.
Google has also been very proactive with Android security.
Linux. Well? Somewhat. Not as much as I'd like. But we generally don't see large scale problems in the wild. Of course, one day we will.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Microsoft sucks, too...and they're deserving of the hate they get, but Kaspersky may suck worse. I lost all respect for them as an "antivirus" application when one of my clients couldn't use Git because of it. Kaspersky identified Git (using SourceTree as a client) as malware, and kind of fucked up her file system, requiring her to do a system restore. After that, the client pretty much refused to use SourceTree, because she was convinced that it was a virus. Fuck Kaspersky...go Microsoft.
Seriously, I work in the IT industry, many of us ban all traffic from Russia and several Asian states by default. This means that Kapersky has the unfortunate side effect even though being cheaper unable to automatically update because it's on russian soil thus for us IT folks we've started to Migrate to other software that does auto update without fail and has local servers. If Kapersky would setup sub update servers on each state and tie their software to the country, with the correct DNS ties in the software the update process wouldn't be that difficult to maintain.
Linux. Well? Somewhat. Not as much as I'd like. But we generally don't see large scale problems in the wild. Of course, one day we will.
The only problems we've seen with Linux have been with server installations, usually targeting software that's only installed on internet-facing servers. We haven't seen anything at all that targets desktop Linux. And it's false to claim that "one day we will"; maybe we will, maybe we won't. With desktop Linux marketshare so low, and little sign of that improving any time soon (despite the absolute horrors of Windows 10), there's not much incentive for malware writers to target it. Of course, there's other factors: Linux has a better security model from the outset, plus it has generally more savvy users who are too smart to install some stupid toolbar, and on top of that it doesn't have Outlook which seems to have been one of the major attack vectors in Windows for a while now. So with all that in mind, it's quite likely we'll never see large-scale problems in the wild with desktop Linux.