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On the contrary, as an American not involved in government work, Kaspersky is one few AV products I'd trust. American antivirus makers like Symantec, Comodo, Mc

On the contrary, as an American not involved in government work, Kaspersky is one few AV products I'd trust. American antivirus makers like Symantec, Comodo, McAfee, Microsoft (Defender), Webroot, and CheckPoint are all subject to secret warrants and infiltration by the US government. Others, like the UK's Sophos, would be subject to US influence as well. You have to think about the motivations of each country. Even if Kaspersky were spying for the Russians, they won't give a damn about your porn, tax cheating, affairs, your padding of expense reports, or whatever they find on your computer. As an American, it's MY government that I'd have to worry about.

trhway 8y ago
>they won't give a damn about your porn, tax cheating, affairs, your padding of expense reports, or whatever they find on your computer. just at some moment in future, when you aren't some nobody like today and have become somebody meaningful, they would make you an offer you wouldn't be able to refuse - either all this collected info is sent to USG or ... Until that they would use it mostly for some innocuous stuff like what specific message to post in your feed to make you vote that specific way. >Even if Kaspersky were spying for the Russians when people say that "if" i'm always reminding myself that it is Western world, people have different mentality here. NSA here had to do _secret_ (or at least Google had to pretend so) tap to Google's fiber where is in Russia FSB has much better VPN into Kaspersky intranet than Kaspersky employees do :)
- linkregister 8y ago
  What's the basis of your accusation that FSB has overt access into Kaspersky's infrastructure?
  - trhway 8y ago
    It isn't accusation :) You're trying to apply Western standards in the domain of completely different standards. And even applying Western standards this is what possible to say : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/11/israel-hack-uncovered-russian-spies-use-kaspersky-lab-2015-report-us-software-federal-government https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/11/israel-ha... "At the time, the Department of Homeland Security said it “is concerned about the ties between certain Kaspersky officials and Russian intelligence and other government agencies, and requirements under Russian law that allow Russian intelligence agencies to request or compel assistance from Kaspersky and to intercept communications transiting Russian networks”" Notice that Kaspersky doesn't lie : "In an official statement about the allegations, Kaspersky Lab said: “As a private company, Kaspersky Lab does not have inappropriate ties to any government, including Russia," as the keyword here is "inappropriate" which the above mentioned law clearly takes care of. Again, all these fine icing-on-the-cake details, like the law and "inappropriate", etc. are only for the Western consumption, as they just don't really matter in the Russian reality if only by virtue of being dwarfed by the things what do matter there. In that reality it would be a really "inappropriate", a faux pas of the scale that is even hard to imagine, if Kaspersky refused to work with FSB :)
    - linkregister 8y ago
      Please share the sources or your reasoning. Edit: thanks! I do recognize that I use Western thinking. Optimism and implicit trust are great!
zby 8y ago
"Even if Kaspersky were spying for the Russians, they won't give a damn about your porn, tax cheating, affairs, your padding of expense reports, or whatever they find on your computer" How can you be so sure about that? You never know what they would need from you. You write on HackerNews - you are probably a computer professional, maybe an admin somewhere, but maybe you just know someone and you'd be useful to put pressure on that person? Think about the Swiss banker from the Snowden leak: """ The Guardian said Snowden described a “formative” incident in which he claimed CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. The operatives purposely got the banker drunk and encouraged him to drive home in his car, he told the newspaper. When the banker was arrested for drunk driving, an undercover agent offered to help “and a bond was formed that led to successful recruitment”. """ The American agencies don't need to blackmail you - they can get access in many other ways.
- bluGill 8y ago
  True, there is that danger. However I have to trust somebody - I don't write anti-virus software. I suppose I could, but it takes time to get expertise in that, time that I wouldn't get to spend with my kids. Not to mention working alone I couldn't fight all the attacks on my computer in a timely manor without help, and thus I still have to depend on other people who might or might not be trustworthy.
  - macintux 8y ago
    You could use a platform that doesn't require anti-virus.
    - sigfubar 8y ago
      Platforms don't require AV software: people do. A security-minded user could live in Windows and never catch a virus. On the other hand, I've seen careless individuals become infected with the worst malware by downloading the wrong thing to their Mac.
      - 8y ago
linkregister 8y ago
This is an absurd argument. Why wouldn't the Russian government seek to take your secrets if it could? Employees at even the most mundane companies, such as SendGrid (email as a service) or Salesforce, have passwords and ssh keys that could permit access to infrastructure. That infrastructure contains valuable information when mined at scale. How do you think these campaigns happen? All 0days? The most public recent nation-state hack, of the Clinton campaign, was done by a phishing page. Yes, we are all targets to some degree of nation states. That said, Kaspersky software is excellent. I would just disable the cloud upload portion of it.
- JTbane 8y ago
  Great point, I cannot stand when the argument is made: "I'd rather have Russian or Chinese backdoors in my software, than allow the possibilty of US authorities to have jurisdiction". It would be better if one chooses their software based on trust, security audits, open source, etc.
scottlocklin 8y ago
FWIIW I use yandex instead of google for exactly the same reasons. The Russians are no doubt scoundrels, but I don't live there.
- gruez 8y ago
  are the search results good? i feel like you can get the same results as google without the privacy violation by using a VPN or a search engine proxy like searx.
  - scottlocklin 8y ago
    They vary over time (I assume they test different algos), but are mostly comparable to google. Qwant isn't bad either.
asdsa5325 8y ago
You think the American government cares about your porn and affairs? Obviously they care about white collar crime, but I'd say committing the crimes is worse than the warrants to uncover them...

trhway 8y ago

>they won't give a damn about your porn, tax cheating, affairs, your padding of expense reports, or whatever they find on your computer. just at some moment in future, when you aren't some nobody like today and have become somebody meaningful, they would make you an offer you wouldn't be able to refuse - either all this collected info is sent to USG or ... Until that they would use it mostly for some innocuous stuff like what specific message to post in your feed to make you vote that specific way. >Even if Kaspersky were spying for the Russians when people say that "if" i'm always reminding myself that it is Western world, people have different mentality here. NSA here had to do _secret_ (or at least Google had to pretend so) tap to Google's fiber where is in Russia FSB has much better VPN into Kaspersky intranet than Kaspersky employees do :)

linkregister 8y ago
What's the basis of your accusation that FSB has overt access into Kaspersky's infrastructure?
- trhway 8y ago
  It isn't accusation :) You're trying to apply Western standards in the domain of completely different standards. And even applying Western standards this is what possible to say : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/11/israel-hack-uncovered-russian-spies-use-kaspersky-lab-2015-report-us-software-federal-government https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/11/israel-ha... "At the time, the Department of Homeland Security said it “is concerned about the ties between certain Kaspersky officials and Russian intelligence and other government agencies, and requirements under Russian law that allow Russian intelligence agencies to request or compel assistance from Kaspersky and to intercept communications transiting Russian networks”" Notice that Kaspersky doesn't lie : "In an official statement about the allegations, Kaspersky Lab said: “As a private company, Kaspersky Lab does not have inappropriate ties to any government, including Russia," as the keyword here is "inappropriate" which the above mentioned law clearly takes care of. Again, all these fine icing-on-the-cake details, like the law and "inappropriate", etc. are only for the Western consumption, as they just don't really matter in the Russian reality if only by virtue of being dwarfed by the things what do matter there. In that reality it would be a really "inappropriate", a faux pas of the scale that is even hard to imagine, if Kaspersky refused to work with FSB :)
  - linkregister 8y ago
    Please share the sources or your reasoning. Edit: thanks! I do recognize that I use Western thinking. Optimism and implicit trust are great!

zby 8y ago

"Even if Kaspersky were spying for the Russians, they won't give a damn about your porn, tax cheating, affairs, your padding of expense reports, or whatever they find on your computer" How can you be so sure about that? You never know what they would need from you. You write on HackerNews - you are probably a computer professional, maybe an admin somewhere, but maybe you just know someone and you'd be useful to put pressure on that person? Think about the Swiss banker from the Snowden leak: """ The Guardian said Snowden described a “formative” incident in which he claimed CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. The operatives purposely got the banker drunk and encouraged him to drive home in his car, he told the newspaper. When the banker was arrested for drunk driving, an undercover agent offered to help “and a bond was formed that led to successful recruitment”. """ The American agencies don't need to blackmail you - they can get access in many other ways.

bluGill 8y ago
True, there is that danger. However I have to trust somebody - I don't write anti-virus software. I suppose I could, but it takes time to get expertise in that, time that I wouldn't get to spend with my kids. Not to mention working alone I couldn't fight all the attacks on my computer in a timely manor without help, and thus I still have to depend on other people who might or might not be trustworthy.
- macintux 8y ago
  You could use a platform that doesn't require anti-virus.
  - sigfubar 8y ago
    Platforms don't require AV software: people do. A security-minded user could live in Windows and never catch a virus. On the other hand, I've seen careless individuals become infected with the worst malware by downloading the wrong thing to their Mac.
    - 8y ago

linkregister 8y ago

This is an absurd argument. Why wouldn't the Russian government seek to take your secrets if it could? Employees at even the most mundane companies, such as SendGrid (email as a service) or Salesforce, have passwords and ssh keys that could permit access to infrastructure. That infrastructure contains valuable information when mined at scale. How do you think these campaigns happen? All 0days? The most public recent nation-state hack, of the Clinton campaign, was done by a phishing page. Yes, we are all targets to some degree of nation states. That said, Kaspersky software is excellent. I would just disable the cloud upload portion of it.

JTbane 8y ago
Great point, I cannot stand when the argument is made: "I'd rather have Russian or Chinese backdoors in my software, than allow the possibilty of US authorities to have jurisdiction". It would be better if one chooses their software based on trust, security audits, open source, etc.

scottlocklin 8y ago

FWIIW I use yandex instead of google for exactly the same reasons. The Russians are no doubt scoundrels, but I don't live there.

gruez 8y ago
are the search results good? i feel like you can get the same results as google without the privacy violation by using a VPN or a search engine proxy like searx.
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  They vary over time (I assume they test different algos), but are mostly comparable to google. Qwant isn't bad either.

asdsa5325 8y ago

You think the American government cares about your porn and affairs? Obviously they care about white collar crime, but I'd say committing the crimes is worse than the warrants to uncover them...