14 ms·

Interesting ideas here: how antivirus becomes a form of censorship. Maybe that’s an extreme view but it feels like now that Microsoft supplies it’s own defender

Interesting ideas here: how antivirus becomes a form of censorship. Maybe that’s an extreme view but it feels like now that Microsoft supplies it’s own defender app. And like all forms of martial law beginning as a way to protect citizens! I also noticed that with win10 when apps crash it sends the data to Microsoft—as though they can fix 3rd party apps for us. Yeesh. I think I’ll skip out on Windows 11 TYVM.

kozak 5y ago
People are downvoting the above comment for some reason, but what is this Windows Defender behavior if not a form of censorship?
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Judging. And it's impossible to build certain feature without judging. A lot of people here probably don't remember what email was like in the 90s/00s, before it got bad enough that Gmail's killer feature was (what we'd now call) cloud-enabled spam filtering. The distinction between judgement and censorship is the amount of user control. (1) Does the user know it happened? (2) Can the user override the decision?
  - hulitu 5y ago
    1) no 2) no. So it seems a good idea to disable defender.
    - colejohnson66 5y ago
      Not true. Defender alerts you when it quarantines a virus or whatever. And if you know what buttons to push, you can tell it to remove it from quarantine. You can also tell it to ignore folders if you so desire.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        Not in this instance. Program was automatically uninstalled. I didn't have time to poke through it, but options appear limited to whitelisting the app going forward, and then reinstalling yourself.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    Given that Defender (apparently) directly deletes the files in question without asking, it seems you agree with the grandparent that it is, in fact, censorship.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  That makes no sense. By that logic, what are firefighters doing but censoring homes? What are koalas but a form of eucalyptus censorship? What is locking your front door but a form of censoring burglars? No, just no. Censorship is preventing the transmission of ideas, nothing more, nothing less. Deleting a file has nothing to do with transmission, and it's being done in response to a perceived threat, not its communicative meaning. (Like how you lock your house to protect from burglars.) It's important not to abuse the term "censorship" -- if it means everything then it ceases to mean anything at all.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    ...I'm less sure of this. If Windows Defender was deleting any file named "Animal Farm.txt", that would be a form of censorship, right? It's preventing the transmission of a piece of political literature. Now, what if it was deleting "Animal Farm - The Video Game.exe"? Now, what if it was deleting the keygen for "Animal Farm - The Video Game"? What if the activation server for that game had gone offline, and this keygen was now the only way to play it? My point being, software (and especially games) can absolutely be a way of expressing ideas, and if you block the software, that seems like censorship to me. I also think that some forms of censorship are fine and even necessary—I don't particularly like stumbling across porn unprepared—but it should be optional.
    - Goronmon 5y ago
      If Windows Defender was deleting any file named "Animal Farm.txt", that would be a form of censorship, right? It's preventing the transmission of a piece of political literature. I guess, in some ways, you could consider it censorship. But without evidence that its being done specifically to target certain types of speech, as opposed to a side effect from some other goal, I'm not sure it's a particularly useful label. What is anti-virus software in general but "censorship" of people's abilities to distribute viruses to whoever they want? What is an adblocker but software that "censors" someone's ability to advertise in the most effective way possible?
    - crazygringo 5y ago
      No, it depends on the intent. If the intent is to prevent the transmission of ideas, then yes it's censorship. If the intent is to protect from harm -- totally unconnected to ideas -- then no it's not censorship. The reason Defender deletes keygens is that they're statistically associated with malware and viruses, as any Google search will terrifyingly immediately reveal. It clearly is falling under the "protect from harm" category as it's designed to do. But so to answer your question clearly: deleting "Animal Farm.txt" because of the ideas inside is censorship (prevents it being transmitted). The video game would similarly be censorship if based on its content. But if it's deleting all keygens, regardless of content of their associated video games, then clearly not censorship.
- bin_bash 5y ago
  That's sort of like arguing a hotdog is a sandwich. It isn't simply because if someone asked for a sandwich and you gave them a hotdog they'd say you gave them the wrong thing—even though technically a sandwich can simply be meat between some bread.
tinus_hn 5y ago
With the convenient excuse that Windows Defender is a separate app that is not part of Windows, of course.
smt88 5y ago
This is incredibly hyperbolic. If you don't like Defender's default behavior (which is sane for the 99.999% of users who are not devs), turn it off or use a different OS.
- mkw2000 5y ago
  Is it? I've personally seen it label keygen type files (with no malware whatsoever) as dangerous more times than I can count. It's false and misleading and I don't see why they couldn't pull the same shit with anything else.
  - smt88 5y ago
    Windows is a consumer/business product. For the vast, vast majority of its customers, keygen files are going to be malware. It would only be censorship if you didn't have a choice to avoid Defender, and you obviously do, or if Microsoft had some sort of political interest in suppressing files named keygen.exe.
    - mkw2000 5y ago
      'For the vast, vast majority of its customers, keygen files are going to be malware.' That's just not true though. They have the ability to detect malware. What they are doing is blindly labeling anything reslembling a keygen as malware , for no valid reason. This also doesn't just apply to Defender.
      - smt88 5y ago
        > What they are doing is blindly labeling anything reslembling a keygen as malware First of all, that's not true. You can test it: create an empty file and name it keygen.exe. It won't get deleted. The code inside the file has some similarly to one of the hundreds of thousands of malware used to train Defender, and there's a false positive. None of that matters, though, because you can just not use it if it causes problems for you.
        deleted 5y ago
chabad360 5y ago
You should probably research how the crash reporting works, but the gist of it is (iirc) companies can register their software with Microsoft and get these crash reports sent to them.
- zabatuvajdka 5y ago
  The problem is that if you’re using a 3rd party app that IS NOT registered, it still sends the crash info to Microsoft.
UnFleshedOne 5y ago
Re crash data: MS actually provides crash data to 3rd party providers who set things up correctly. So if you have a desktop app you don't need to roll your own crash collecting system if Winqual [0] is enough. Apps that roll their own (like chrome and 100s of other crashpad based apps) usually disable MS error reporting for their executables. Also MS does ship shims for popular 3rd party apps that don't fix themselves, for better or worse... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winqual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winqual
- zabatuvajdka 5y ago
  The problem is that if you’re using a 3rd party app that IS NOT registered, it still sends the crash info to Microsoft. They should create some better apps to manage/configure that stuff. All I see as a user is when any app crashes it gets sent to Microsoft.
  - UnFleshedOne 5y ago
    Yeah, because MS sometimes fixes or shims those too, if they are too popular (or fixes bugs in their own API if those led to the crashes). Of all the questionable telemetry this one is actually useful...
jodrellblank 5y ago
> "Microsoft—as though they can fix 3rd party apps for us.." They can, and have done for decades. The classic famous one is retold by Joel Spolsky as "[...] a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95". One from Raymond Chen is a program which hacked its way through the control panel printers menu and Microsoft had to detect that, put a dummy menu for it to use, then trigger what it was trying to achieve. Since then application compatibility has become its own subsystem in Windows which developers, enterprises and Microsoft can use to create compatibility shims to make programs keep working even if their makers have gone out of business. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32723 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-7/dd837644(v=ws.10) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/i... > "Interesting ideas here: how antivirus becomes a form of censorship. Maybe that’s an extreme view but it feels like now that Microsoft supplies it’s own defender app" Why didn't it feel like that for all the other antivirus false positives from McAfee, Symantec, Norton, F-Secure, Panda, et al over the years? And how is Microsoft (not a government) or Defender (optional) anything to do with martial law?
mistrial9 5y ago
lowering the quality of the discussion admittedly, but in the most generous possible tone of voice, I ask, why does "thunderbong" have password protected zip files of game-cracking exe files ? because of smoking weed and piratin games thats why ! and, should the wealthiest corporations on earth be in charge of making sure that thunderbong does not get to make game cheats at home ?? of course NOT on the other hand, as a software developer in the 90s, I went to Hong Kong, and saw first hand stalls of 100% pirated movies, games, OS and apps.. lots of it, with professional COPIED artwork and packaging .. as a content creator this was really disturbing.. people told me that there are no software development jobs (then) only hardware companies, for this exact reason Summarize- commerce takes place in a market, and theft is a real, constant problem, both at the commercial level (Hong Kong) and personal level (Thunderbong). Yet, society must have some stable relief valves for overzealous, rich Sheriff types, and overreaching rich merchant types, to prevent rifling through the rights, privacy and headspace of Thunderbong, and the legitimate customer THEY might become, while dealing with commercial pirates who are just basically stealing. I am a Westerner, and I have to say, I am more concerned that Thunderbong have a safe life, than I am about the profits of Merchant and turf of Sheriff.
biryani_chicken 5y ago
Few days ago it flagged a test binary from Ghidra: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/issues/3160 https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/issues/3160
kalleboo 5y ago
> I also noticed that with win10 when apps crash it sends the data to Microsoft—as though they can fix 3rd party apps for us I don't develop software for any Microsoft platforms, but on the platform I develop for it's actually common for the vendor to break something in their API, so that crashes in 3rd party apps are actually due to a regression in the platform frameworks. Analyzing third-party crash reports could guide them in catching those cases.

kozak 5y ago

People are downvoting the above comment for some reason, but what is this Windows Defender behavior if not a form of censorship?

ethbr0 5y ago
Judging. And it's impossible to build certain feature without judging. A lot of people here probably don't remember what email was like in the 90s/00s, before it got bad enough that Gmail's killer feature was (what we'd now call) cloud-enabled spam filtering. The distinction between judgement and censorship is the amount of user control. (1) Does the user know it happened? (2) Can the user override the decision?
- hulitu 5y ago
  1) no 2) no. So it seems a good idea to disable defender.
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    Not true. Defender alerts you when it quarantines a virus or whatever. And if you know what buttons to push, you can tell it to remove it from quarantine. You can also tell it to ignore folders if you so desire.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Not in this instance. Program was automatically uninstalled. I didn't have time to poke through it, but options appear limited to whitelisting the app going forward, and then reinstalling yourself.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  Given that Defender (apparently) directly deletes the files in question without asking, it seems you agree with the grandparent that it is, in fact, censorship.
crazygringo 5y ago
That makes no sense. By that logic, what are firefighters doing but censoring homes? What are koalas but a form of eucalyptus censorship? What is locking your front door but a form of censoring burglars? No, just no. Censorship is preventing the transmission of ideas, nothing more, nothing less. Deleting a file has nothing to do with transmission, and it's being done in response to a perceived threat, not its communicative meaning. (Like how you lock your house to protect from burglars.) It's important not to abuse the term "censorship" -- if it means everything then it ceases to mean anything at all.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  ...I'm less sure of this. If Windows Defender was deleting any file named "Animal Farm.txt", that would be a form of censorship, right? It's preventing the transmission of a piece of political literature. Now, what if it was deleting "Animal Farm - The Video Game.exe"? Now, what if it was deleting the keygen for "Animal Farm - The Video Game"? What if the activation server for that game had gone offline, and this keygen was now the only way to play it? My point being, software (and especially games) can absolutely be a way of expressing ideas, and if you block the software, that seems like censorship to me. I also think that some forms of censorship are fine and even necessary—I don't particularly like stumbling across porn unprepared—but it should be optional.
  - Goronmon 5y ago
    If Windows Defender was deleting any file named "Animal Farm.txt", that would be a form of censorship, right? It's preventing the transmission of a piece of political literature. I guess, in some ways, you could consider it censorship. But without evidence that its being done specifically to target certain types of speech, as opposed to a side effect from some other goal, I'm not sure it's a particularly useful label. What is anti-virus software in general but "censorship" of people's abilities to distribute viruses to whoever they want? What is an adblocker but software that "censors" someone's ability to advertise in the most effective way possible?
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    No, it depends on the intent. If the intent is to prevent the transmission of ideas, then yes it's censorship. If the intent is to protect from harm -- totally unconnected to ideas -- then no it's not censorship. The reason Defender deletes keygens is that they're statistically associated with malware and viruses, as any Google search will terrifyingly immediately reveal. It clearly is falling under the "protect from harm" category as it's designed to do. But so to answer your question clearly: deleting "Animal Farm.txt" because of the ideas inside is censorship (prevents it being transmitted). The video game would similarly be censorship if based on its content. But if it's deleting all keygens, regardless of content of their associated video games, then clearly not censorship.
bin_bash 5y ago
That's sort of like arguing a hotdog is a sandwich. It isn't simply because if someone asked for a sandwich and you gave them a hotdog they'd say you gave them the wrong thing—even though technically a sandwich can simply be meat between some bread.

tinus_hn 5y ago

With the convenient excuse that Windows Defender is a separate app that is not part of Windows, of course.

smt88 5y ago

This is incredibly hyperbolic. If you don't like Defender's default behavior (which is sane for the 99.999% of users who are not devs), turn it off or use a different OS.

mkw2000 5y ago
Is it? I've personally seen it label keygen type files (with no malware whatsoever) as dangerous more times than I can count. It's false and misleading and I don't see why they couldn't pull the same shit with anything else.
- smt88 5y ago
  Windows is a consumer/business product. For the vast, vast majority of its customers, keygen files are going to be malware. It would only be censorship if you didn't have a choice to avoid Defender, and you obviously do, or if Microsoft had some sort of political interest in suppressing files named keygen.exe.
  - mkw2000 5y ago
    'For the vast, vast majority of its customers, keygen files are going to be malware.' That's just not true though. They have the ability to detect malware. What they are doing is blindly labeling anything reslembling a keygen as malware , for no valid reason. This also doesn't just apply to Defender.
    - smt88 5y ago
      > What they are doing is blindly labeling anything reslembling a keygen as malware First of all, that's not true. You can test it: create an empty file and name it keygen.exe. It won't get deleted. The code inside the file has some similarly to one of the hundreds of thousands of malware used to train Defender, and there's a false positive. None of that matters, though, because you can just not use it if it causes problems for you.
      - deleted 5y ago

chabad360 5y ago

You should probably research how the crash reporting works, but the gist of it is (iirc) companies can register their software with Microsoft and get these crash reports sent to them.

zabatuvajdka 5y ago
The problem is that if you’re using a 3rd party app that IS NOT registered, it still sends the crash info to Microsoft.

UnFleshedOne 5y ago

Re crash data: MS actually provides crash data to 3rd party providers who set things up correctly. So if you have a desktop app you don't need to roll your own crash collecting system if Winqual [0] is enough. Apps that roll their own (like chrome and 100s of other crashpad based apps) usually disable MS error reporting for their executables. Also MS does ship shims for popular 3rd party apps that don't fix themselves, for better or worse... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winqual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winqual

zabatuvajdka 5y ago
The problem is that if you’re using a 3rd party app that IS NOT registered, it still sends the crash info to Microsoft. They should create some better apps to manage/configure that stuff. All I see as a user is when any app crashes it gets sent to Microsoft.
- UnFleshedOne 5y ago
  Yeah, because MS sometimes fixes or shims those too, if they are too popular (or fixes bugs in their own API if those led to the crashes). Of all the questionable telemetry this one is actually useful...

jodrellblank 5y ago

> "Microsoft—as though they can fix 3rd party apps for us.." They can, and have done for decades. The classic famous one is retold by Joel Spolsky as "[...] a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95". One from Raymond Chen is a program which hacked its way through the control panel printers menu and Microsoft had to detect that, put a dummy menu for it to use, then trigger what it was trying to achieve. Since then application compatibility has become its own subsystem in Windows which developers, enterprises and Microsoft can use to create compatibility shims to make programs keep working even if their makers have gone out of business. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32723 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-27/?p=32... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-7/dd837644(v=ws.10) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/i... > "Interesting ideas here: how antivirus becomes a form of censorship. Maybe that’s an extreme view but it feels like now that Microsoft supplies it’s own defender app" Why didn't it feel like that for all the other antivirus false positives from McAfee, Symantec, Norton, F-Secure, Panda, et al over the years? And how is Microsoft (not a government) or Defender (optional) anything to do with martial law?

mistrial9 5y ago

lowering the quality of the discussion admittedly, but in the most generous possible tone of voice, I ask, why does "thunderbong" have password protected zip files of game-cracking exe files ? because of smoking weed and piratin games thats why ! and, should the wealthiest corporations on earth be in charge of making sure that thunderbong does not get to make game cheats at home ?? of course NOT on the other hand, as a software developer in the 90s, I went to Hong Kong, and saw first hand stalls of 100% pirated movies, games, OS and apps.. lots of it, with professional COPIED artwork and packaging .. as a content creator this was really disturbing.. people told me that there are no software development jobs (then) only hardware companies, for this exact reason Summarize- commerce takes place in a market, and theft is a real, constant problem, both at the commercial level (Hong Kong) and personal level (Thunderbong). Yet, society must have some stable relief valves for overzealous, rich Sheriff types, and overreaching rich merchant types, to prevent rifling through the rights, privacy and headspace of Thunderbong, and the legitimate customer THEY might become, while dealing with commercial pirates who are just basically stealing. I am a Westerner, and I have to say, I am more concerned that Thunderbong have a safe life, than I am about the profits of Merchant and turf of Sheriff.

biryani_chicken 5y ago

Few days ago it flagged a test binary from Ghidra: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/issues/3160 https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/issues/3160

kalleboo 5y ago

> I also noticed that with win10 when apps crash it sends the data to Microsoft—as though they can fix 3rd party apps for us I don't develop software for any Microsoft platforms, but on the platform I develop for it's actually common for the vendor to break something in their API, so that crashes in 3rd party apps are actually due to a regression in the platform frameworks. Analyzing third-party crash reports could guide them in catching those cases.