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The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast
- aaa189156189 7y agomaybe https://imgur.com https://imgur.com ?
- thomasdd 7y agoMaybe just my point-of-view. But Czech-Slovak companies have strong influence in antivirus software. With avast.com / avg.com / eset.com ...or does every country in world have their own AV software (local)giants? I'am curious...
- reportgunner 7y agoGreat question! I'm a local and I don't know either..
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bitL 7y agoI think a few AV companies whose products I utilized in the past were from Romania as well (BitDefender?).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ackbar03 7y agoI feel like the old soviet countries including russia now are all quite strong in the cybersecurity space. I've heard its because of a combination of their strong math/science education and poverty? I've always found it quite intrigueing
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoI grew up in Eastern Europe and moved to Western Europe in my early 20s and the difference is that in the East, STEM was very popular for kids in high school and university as it offered access to engineering careers which were the most lucrative considering how poor the economy was in the 90s, helping kids of lower class background move upwards(just like in the US) and it would also open doors later in life to emigrate to the West. Now in Western Europe, due to socialism and high standard of living, kids aren't that poor and tech salaries are not that much higher than any other desk job so they have no interest to study STEM as it's seen as stressful career path for boring lonely nerds and instead prefer to focus on social sciences, being wantrepreneurs or Instagram influencers.
- rokalakt 7y agoNot sure, what western european countries pays as much for a tech job as for any other desk job? Also i dont think it has something to do with skills, more like with criminals creating virii and thus developing and understanding of how security works.
- danielpetrica 7y agoHere in Italy that's very common during your first years, especially if you're not living in a big city like Milan.
- goatinaboat 7y agoOutside the SV bubble law, accounting, banking, medicine, general management etc all pay higher than programming, with less stress, more job security and higher prestige (if that matters to you).
- rokalakt 7y agoNot really. Devs in the uk earn far more than most of these jobs you mentioned. Perhaps you are working with the wrong company.
- maxerickson 7y agoThe US has Microsoft.
- dchest 7y agoWho bought Romanian antivirus company.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoMicrosoft's own inbuilt Windows Defender is Romania's former RAV Antivirus which they bought in 2003.[1] [1]https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/yongrhee/2019/02/21/windows-10-windows-server-2016-windows-server-2019-antivirus-av/ https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/yongrhee/2019/02/21/wind...
- rokalakt 7y agoNo wonder windows defender is such low quality.
- goatinaboat 7y agoNo, it’s a completely different codebase now.
- rasz 7y agoEastern Europe ran on pirated software thru the nineties. You need good antivirus when running random software copy obtained at the farmers' market from under the blanket.
- slartibardfast0 7y agowish AV vendors would stop MiTM attacks on HTTPs
- c16 7y agoThis. I lost a lot of respect when Firefox complained that something was wrong, and it turned out to be Avast doing a man in the middle attack to 'protect' me on https websites.
- techntoke 7y agoYou really have to be careful what you check to install or enable when using antivirus software. I think Windows 10 does a pretty good job without any extra software, but there are people that still torrent movies and open EXE files from whatever website they access. Sometimes teenagers or older people. Who knows what they are putting on their computer, and I imagine a lot of it is able to bypass standard AV products.
- philjohn 7y agoThat's why if you want to install Avast you deselect everything except for the file shield and behaviour shield.
- xan92 7y agoAround 2003/04 was installing Avast/AVG on my friends desktops/PCs was a wonderful freeware. I started working as a system administrator around 2007 when I did the same on a few office machines, I had noticed how they became rogue, By infecting healthy machines with malware and prompting to buy paid version for removal, I am not sure if anyone remembers this thing with Avast ?
- bitL 7y agoNever understood how they survived that. Now they seem to be dominating their country's tech landscape. Market ended up rewarding sociopathic behavior. Pretty terrible.
- w8rbt 7y agoI have never heard this. Can you provide a link with more details?
- xan92 7y agoThis was my personal and honest experience with Avast. They were the first scareware pioneers, If you have used them as I did you would have noticed.
- sneakernets 7y agoInfecting machines with malware intentionally? They did this and are still allowed to sell product?
- b212 7y agoThis is BS. They never did that.
- w8rbt 7y agoI did use it then and I never experienced that. I bet it was some unrelated coincidence. They would not do that.
- mac_was 7y ago'Baza wirusow zostala zaktualizowana' - in every Polish home 10 years ago.
- julienreszka 7y agoIt wasn't only in polish. We had this in French too. "La base virale VPS a été mise a jour" https://youtu.be/PMro9K5EM0s https://youtu.be/PMro9K5EM0s
- tardo99 7y agoAntivirus software is basically a scam.
- paulpauper 7y agoironically it injects crap into your computer so that you cannot uninstall it fully, to prevent people from renewing the free trial.
- raverbashing 7y agoThough the "hard to uninstall" part is exactly so that malware can't uninstall it easily.
- indigodaddy 7y agoYeah, on Mac/Windows, I just install the free version of Malwarebytes and do a full scan occasionally...
- assclown99 7y agoI worked at an ad network company for years (we basically put crappy add-ons on poeple's machines that generate search revenue). All of these AV companies basically extort money from crapware companies. if you pay them, you can get unblocked.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoSounds fascinating. Please tell us more.
- yyyk 7y agoThere isn't a big difference between most AV and malware nowadays. Both hog all your system resources, both send info about you to HQ, both spread often piggybacking on other software, both are hard-to-impossible to remove.
- NelsonMinar 7y agoAt this point Avast is way worse than the malware it claims to protect you from. I've been running Windows for years now with just Microsoft's built-in malware protection and it's fine.
- ticmasta 7y agoBack in the day when 3rd party antivirus on windows was a must, these guys were the best price-performance trade-off. Then windows added defender as a standard that was as good, with the added benefit of a shared best interest of making windows run well; at the same time avast et al. moved to scummy practices and FUD. Good riddance.
- viburnum 7y agoI had forgotten how bad it was back then, and why it was such a relief to leave windows for Linux and mac.
- a_c 7y agoAV is almost a cargo cult nowadays. Born for windows, now as a de facto must have for corporate IT. Everyone use it. Either no IT bothers to question why is it needed, or management hold beliefs from the 90s that AV is useful
- fancyfish 7y agoFriendly reminder that free editions of Avast collect and sell[1] user clickstream data to one of Avast's companies, Jumpshot[2][3]. This "panel" includes 100m "online shoppers" and 20m app users, in total registering 5 billion clicks every day. [1] https://martechtoday.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-purchasing-data-other-digital-consumer-insights-to-marketers-223352 https://martechtoday.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-p... [2] https://www.jumpshot.com/ https://www.jumpshot.com/ [3] https://press.avast.com/avast-software-acquires-jumpshot-to-work-magic-against-slow-pc-performance https://press.avast.com/avast-software-acquires-jumpshot-to-...