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Wild that windows feels it important to scan every file going from one local drive to another. my laptop has gotten a lot quieter after turning off virus protec

Wild that windows feels it important to scan every file going from one local drive to another. my laptop has gotten a lot quieter after turning off virus protection, I wonder how much electricity is burned just idley checking for viruses. Edit: thanks for the replies, on second thought it is pretty tricky to know a file you’re writing already exists without trusting the process doing the copying

passerby1 5y ago
Interesting question! When mankind will really need to calculate costs and try to get rid of such an entrenched "habits" as av-scanning (same as to crypto-mining nowadays), it could be too late to do something. Or take banks. I was amazed to see how much manual work is done in financial institutions. Skyscrapers with bank name on top of it filled with tens of thousands people. Everyone has computer, among other things burning electricity. Separately, datacenters. How does it compares to crypto? I doubt it's less, if sum up all banks. But anyway, av-scanning is doing much good, but can be socially out-engineered in a single click, making it useless in most critical cases.
- nightfly 5y ago
  Re: banks/crypto Crypto's current energy consumption is doing a miniscule fraction of the transaction handling that banks are. If you scaled up current crypto to match banks, I don't think that would even be possible.
  - therein 5y ago
    Crypto's power consumption is not truly related to the transaction volume.
    - nwah1 5y ago
      Right, the transaction volume it can support will never change, but the energy consumption rises as a function of the price, with no upper bound.
      - Groxx 5y ago
        ... every piece of that sentence is straightforwardly incorrect.
        jazzyjackson 5y ago
        Do you want to explain how? AFAIK The number of transactions per block and the rate at which blocks are confirmed has nothing to do with how many people are burning through hashes. And the price of a token is a kind of bounty for mining a block: the higher the price, the more money can be spent trying to win the bounty while still being profitable. You wouldn't see data centers full of ASICs if the reward was only a few hundred bucks. So how straight forward is it?
        Groxx 5y ago
        Their: >the transaction volume it can support will never change is plainly ridiculous (as proof: transaction volume has changed, and multiple changes have been successfully made that increase the peak volume), and is also covered by your: >AFAIK The number of transactions per block and the rate at which blocks are confirmed has nothing to do with how many people are burning through hashes. as for: >the energy consumption rises as a function of the price, with no upper bound. though there's obviously some relation to price and electricity use (i.e. hashing power, ignoring tech improvements), that direct relation really only makes sense with the per-block rewards... which keep halving, and that does not immediately lead to 1/2 hashing power. the market has repeatedly demonstrated that price and value-per-block do not directly relate to hashing/electricity. on top of that, transaction fees are taking a larger and larger proportion of it, and that's related pretty much solely to transaction volume (which does not noticeably affect electricity, as you pointed out), not value per coin or electricity. as far as "no upper bound"... only if you ignore market effects, like if electricity became free globally. since it's market-driven though, as beyond a certain point it's not profitable, you can't ignore that. and again, hashing power has dropped many times in the past, clearly demonstrating effective upper bounds at any given time.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- Spooky23 5y ago
  I’ve always found amusement in the ironic carbon navel gazing found on message boards.
- saghm 5y ago
  Sure, but banks those banks are actually providing value for large numbers of real people right now; cryptocurrencies have yet to show that they can do much what has been claimed about them.
  - atoav 5y ago
    I recall paying for a coffe with bitcoin once. The transaction took 30 minutes despite an above average fee which was much more than e.g. PayPal would have taken. This was when I knew that bitcoin is unsuitable to replace other payment providers.
- jahnu 5y ago
  Most manual financial work in banks is not on mere transactions. It's on higher level structures such as doing due diligence on lending. A small fraction of the employees are actively keeping the basic transaction mechanisms going. Rest assured that fraction that is working on those is, per transaction, a mere fart in the proverbial hurricane that is crypto energy use per transaction.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  > Interesting question! When mankind will really need to calculate costs and try to get rid of such an entrenched "habits" as av-scanning (same as to crypto-mining nowadays), it could be too late to do something. > Or take banks. I was amazed to see how much manual work is done in financial institutions. Skyscrapers with bank name on top of it filled with tens of thousands people. Everyone has computer, among other things burning electricity. Separately, datacenters. How does it compares to crypto? I doubt it's less, if sum up all banks. You'd be likely wrong. Bitcoin now uses the same energy as the whole country of Argentina with 43 million people. For comparison Bank of America has 200 000 employees. Are there more than 200 banks of that size, maybe but I'm doubtful. Moreover Argentinas energy consumption includes vastly more energy intensive endeavours than banking (manufacturing, mining etc). from that estimate I would be very doubtful that the whole banking sector uses more energy than bitcoin mining. Moreover as others pointed out the banking sector serves many more people with many services that bitcoin can't provide.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dataflow 5y ago
I think it's probably because the system doesn't see it as "copying", it sees it as "writing arbitrary data that just-so-happens-to-be identical to existing data in another open file". It'd be tricky to figure out (and verify in a secure manner) that data is in fact being copied.
- saghm 5y ago
  I mean, if you're literally using the Windows utility for copying files (either by clicking copy/paste in Explorer or using whatever the DOS equivalent of "cp" is), it seem like it shouldn't be that tricky for them to make it work at least for the built-in AV, which is what the parent comment was talking about.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    I think that depends on whether you want to trust already-executing programs or not. If you trust them, then sure, it's pretty straightforward: you just tell the AV what to scan vs. not. If you don't, then it's not: you have to either offload the copying to kernel-mode, or delegate it to a secured user-mode process, because otherwise a malicious program could just modify the buffer you're copying from. The former makes sense from a performance standpoint but the latter also makes sense from a security standpoint.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    An issue is the original files are not guaranteed to be trusted. If for instance your were copying files from a flash drive or a network permission, it would seem natural to rescan every file that is copied to a local disk. From there the more the "outside"/"inside" line gets blurry (e.g. what if it was synced from Dropbox ? or data got injected by an arbitrary program etc.), the more it becomes justified to just scan every file moving anywhere. If the goal is indeed to scan files in the first place.
- buraktamturk 5y ago
  If I remember correctly the CreateFileEx win32 api takes a flag and template file handle to copy when creating a new file. Maybe the copy operations can use this api and expect AV software to ignore the operation. (I have no idea about the performance of such approach) Or maybe a syscall (preferably at filesystem level) that can be introduced for bulk copying purposes and AVs can ignore such calls.
greggman3 5y ago
I don't know under what circumstances Windows scans files but I do no that copying a file to the same drive does not rescan the file. I found this out because grunt-copy-contrib copies incorrectly by opening the src, reading bytes, writing to dest instead of just asking the OS to copy the file. Switch it to ask the OS to copy the file removed the scanning (windows already knows it scanned the file so no need to scan a copy).

passerby1 5y ago

Interesting question! When mankind will really need to calculate costs and try to get rid of such an entrenched "habits" as av-scanning (same as to crypto-mining nowadays), it could be too late to do something. Or take banks. I was amazed to see how much manual work is done in financial institutions. Skyscrapers with bank name on top of it filled with tens of thousands people. Everyone has computer, among other things burning electricity. Separately, datacenters. How does it compares to crypto? I doubt it's less, if sum up all banks. But anyway, av-scanning is doing much good, but can be socially out-engineered in a single click, making it useless in most critical cases.

nightfly 5y ago
Re: banks/crypto Crypto's current energy consumption is doing a miniscule fraction of the transaction handling that banks are. If you scaled up current crypto to match banks, I don't think that would even be possible.
- therein 5y ago
  Crypto's power consumption is not truly related to the transaction volume.
  - nwah1 5y ago
    Right, the transaction volume it can support will never change, but the energy consumption rises as a function of the price, with no upper bound.
    - Groxx 5y ago
      ... every piece of that sentence is straightforwardly incorrect.
      - jazzyjackson 5y ago
        Do you want to explain how? AFAIK The number of transactions per block and the rate at which blocks are confirmed has nothing to do with how many people are burning through hashes. And the price of a token is a kind of bounty for mining a block: the higher the price, the more money can be spent trying to win the bounty while still being profitable. You wouldn't see data centers full of ASICs if the reward was only a few hundred bucks. So how straight forward is it?
        Groxx 5y ago
        Their: >the transaction volume it can support will never change is plainly ridiculous (as proof: transaction volume has changed, and multiple changes have been successfully made that increase the peak volume), and is also covered by your: >AFAIK The number of transactions per block and the rate at which blocks are confirmed has nothing to do with how many people are burning through hashes. as for: >the energy consumption rises as a function of the price, with no upper bound. though there's obviously some relation to price and electricity use (i.e. hashing power, ignoring tech improvements), that direct relation really only makes sense with the per-block rewards... which keep halving, and that does not immediately lead to 1/2 hashing power. the market has repeatedly demonstrated that price and value-per-block do not directly relate to hashing/electricity. on top of that, transaction fees are taking a larger and larger proportion of it, and that's related pretty much solely to transaction volume (which does not noticeably affect electricity, as you pointed out), not value per coin or electricity. as far as "no upper bound"... only if you ignore market effects, like if electricity became free globally. since it's market-driven though, as beyond a certain point it's not profitable, you can't ignore that. and again, hashing power has dropped many times in the past, clearly demonstrating effective upper bounds at any given time.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
Spooky23 5y ago
I’ve always found amusement in the ironic carbon navel gazing found on message boards.
saghm 5y ago
Sure, but banks those banks are actually providing value for large numbers of real people right now; cryptocurrencies have yet to show that they can do much what has been claimed about them.
- atoav 5y ago
  I recall paying for a coffe with bitcoin once. The transaction took 30 minutes despite an above average fee which was much more than e.g. PayPal would have taken. This was when I knew that bitcoin is unsuitable to replace other payment providers.
jahnu 5y ago
Most manual financial work in banks is not on mere transactions. It's on higher level structures such as doing due diligence on lending. A small fraction of the employees are actively keeping the basic transaction mechanisms going. Rest assured that fraction that is working on those is, per transaction, a mere fart in the proverbial hurricane that is crypto energy use per transaction.
cycomanic 5y ago
> Interesting question! When mankind will really need to calculate costs and try to get rid of such an entrenched "habits" as av-scanning (same as to crypto-mining nowadays), it could be too late to do something. > Or take banks. I was amazed to see how much manual work is done in financial institutions. Skyscrapers with bank name on top of it filled with tens of thousands people. Everyone has computer, among other things burning electricity. Separately, datacenters. How does it compares to crypto? I doubt it's less, if sum up all banks. You'd be likely wrong. Bitcoin now uses the same energy as the whole country of Argentina with 43 million people. For comparison Bank of America has 200 000 employees. Are there more than 200 banks of that size, maybe but I'm doubtful. Moreover Argentinas energy consumption includes vastly more energy intensive endeavours than banking (manufacturing, mining etc). from that estimate I would be very doubtful that the whole banking sector uses more energy than bitcoin mining. Moreover as others pointed out the banking sector serves many more people with many services that bitcoin can't provide.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dataflow 5y ago

I think it's probably because the system doesn't see it as "copying", it sees it as "writing arbitrary data that just-so-happens-to-be identical to existing data in another open file". It'd be tricky to figure out (and verify in a secure manner) that data is in fact being copied.

saghm 5y ago
I mean, if you're literally using the Windows utility for copying files (either by clicking copy/paste in Explorer or using whatever the DOS equivalent of "cp" is), it seem like it shouldn't be that tricky for them to make it work at least for the built-in AV, which is what the parent comment was talking about.
- dataflow 5y ago
  I think that depends on whether you want to trust already-executing programs or not. If you trust them, then sure, it's pretty straightforward: you just tell the AV what to scan vs. not. If you don't, then it's not: you have to either offload the copying to kernel-mode, or delegate it to a secured user-mode process, because otherwise a malicious program could just modify the buffer you're copying from. The former makes sense from a performance standpoint but the latter also makes sense from a security standpoint.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  An issue is the original files are not guaranteed to be trusted. If for instance your were copying files from a flash drive or a network permission, it would seem natural to rescan every file that is copied to a local disk. From there the more the "outside"/"inside" line gets blurry (e.g. what if it was synced from Dropbox ? or data got injected by an arbitrary program etc.), the more it becomes justified to just scan every file moving anywhere. If the goal is indeed to scan files in the first place.
buraktamturk 5y ago
If I remember correctly the CreateFileEx win32 api takes a flag and template file handle to copy when creating a new file. Maybe the copy operations can use this api and expect AV software to ignore the operation. (I have no idea about the performance of such approach) Or maybe a syscall (preferably at filesystem level) that can be introduced for bulk copying purposes and AVs can ignore such calls.

greggman3 5y ago

I don't know under what circumstances Windows scans files but I do no that copying a file to the same drive does not rescan the file. I found this out because grunt-copy-contrib copies incorrectly by opening the src, reading bytes, writing to dest instead of just asking the OS to copy the file. Switch it to ask the OS to copy the file removed the scanning (windows already knows it scanned the file so no need to scan a copy).