> "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

> "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?