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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."
Microsoft has been an upstanding corporate citizen since settling the US antitrust case and increasing its lobbying budget from zero dollars to millions of dollars each year.
That company makes cars easily stolen because the lock is weak. Thus a number of 3rd party shops sell locks that improve the car security. Then the car maker decides to fix the locks and the 3rd party accessory is not necessary anymore - who is to blame? Seriously, these anti-viruses have always been Windows parasites that only flourished thanks to Microsoft unable to implement a decent security solution earlier.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.