Microsoft admits to disabling third-party antivirus code if Win 10 doesn't like it Windows 10 does disable some third-party security software, Microsoft has admitted, but because of compatibility – not competitive – issues. Redmond is currently being investigated in the EU, Germany and Russia over alleged anti-competitive behavior because it bundles the Windows Defender security suite into its latest …
Similarly, there's no great reason for MS to remove things like Speccy, Classic Shell, or CCleaner. They don't have competing products for any of those things.
Sure, they don't have competing services, but let's examine the culprits:
- Classic Shell make WinX usable
- Speccy will show you how much bloat there's built in WinX
- CCleaner will remove all those interesting logs just waiting to be slurped.
Any sane company would want these kind of programs removed.
There is one aspect of old AV software that is worth remembering. It has complete access to the entire system, and it can itself become a vector for infection. We have already seen this, where the AV software's update mechanism could be turned against it and used to install malware.
Let me see, which one was it that had that problem. Ah yes, MS defender!
It would be highly weird if MS used that particular example as part of their defence against Kasperky's case...
That doesn't mean the point is invalid. Old AV software can be very dangerous if exploitable bugs are found. If so, removing it is likely better than leaving it running. But MS declaring it to be actually dangerous simply because it old is probably a step too far.
What seems totally indefensible is MS managing what apps install or not based on some weird perception of compatibility. An application is either compiled for Windows, or it's not. MS's criteria seem to be covering other aspects of applications (colour scheme?).
I could understand it a tiny bit if an application was using a deprecated API call. If that's the case then they should put up a dialogue box saying so, or just complete the deprecation process by actually removing the API call from the OS. That would break the application, but at least there'd be a trail of notices to developers giving fair warning.
I'm a long time Win 7 user. If Apple sort out their hardware line up I'll be heading for Mac land when 7 drops off support.
Building a Hackintosh is very easy these days. Once you have a USB stick with Sierra on it, installing it takes as long as installing Linux.
I have one and the only gripe I have with it is the lack of USB-3 (usb-2 works fine) support. But a 4-port PCI card that is supported is on its way.
Like at least one poster here, I spent years developing software and I am amazed at how shitty W10 is both in terms of functionality and quality. Given all the resources MS has available... The mind boggles.
And still quite not legal, I guess... and while bedroom/basement users may not care, professional users have to.
It's also interesting people believe it's ok to counter MS bad behavious - and possibly illegal - with other bad behaviours, possibly illegal. After all, you're not better than MS, and, if working for it, you would act the same ugly way.
Hackintosh legality depends on your country. I can, for example, support them but not sell them. Over the border in Germany, you can sell them.
In general, Apple doesn't care even if you use it professionally so long as a) you buy a licence and b) you don't sell boxen at retail. They are quite aware that hackies are not going to affect their sales, but pissing off hardware fiddlers is going to lead to bad press.
Depnding on the client, they are either blown away by the hackintosh, since it's pretty much a decently specced whitebox PC without BS marget segmentatio, so you get a lot of grunt without breaking the bank. Or the clients hate it, because it's not stylish.
I have on occasion set up Hackintosh VMs, but mainly to maintain familiarity with how the OS works. While mildly entertaining, I haven't found anything particularly exciting about it to switch any of my Linux boxes to MacOS (since that's what all my machines run now). I could probably fiddle with it and make it adequately functional, but I could do that with MSWindows just as easily. So I'll stick with my Linux systems that already work the way I want.
"I'm a long time Win 7 user. If Apple sort out their hardware line up I'll be heading for Mac land when 7 drops off support."
I'm sorry, it's hard to take anyone seriously when they say 'Microsoft are being too controlling over which software I can install, I'm off to Apple land'.
@Naselus
"I'm sorry, it's hard to take anyone seriously when they say 'Microsoft are being too controlling over which software I can install, I'm off to Apple land'."
Oooooooh...! MacOS demands an Admin password to install software downloaded from the internet! How horribly nannyish of them! <eyeroll>
If you don't live in Russia, you don't want to be using Kaspersky Antivirus. The Russian government has full access to their software, there is nothing the company can do about it (short of executives being arrested).
sed -e 's/Russia/U.S.A./g' -e 's/Russian/American/' -e 's/Kaspersky Antivirus/Windows/'
Ah. Feeling better already ;P
I would take that to mean that only people who don't live in Russia _should_ use Kaspersky. What do I care if the Russian government has my personal data? They're not going to use what they learned to fabricate some nonsense about how I must be a terrorist or criminal and come arrest me when I am not in Russia. My own country may do that to me, but they're not getting that information from Kaspersky. They'd get it from Microsoft or Google, which are about a million times worse.
I noticed that Edge kept trying to take over display of PDF files from Acrobat [that may or may not be a good thing depending upon your point of view.]
But yes, Edge cannot be removed, neither can the Media Player, nor Cortana or any of this other tripe foisted on an unsuspecting Windows 10 user. Completely agree with the 'they've had the past 25 years to sort this argument.'
O365 is just a low point of resistance to generate a revenue stream that never gets turned off - the big lesson M$ found from X.Box live, 60 million people paying £60 a year is a LOT of share price propping revenue. Same applies to O365. Mugs.
The OS can do anything. "Other" software has to play within the permissions granted by the OS.
Well, actually, no. As regular readers of this publication will know, other applications can simply send an appropriate message to the secret web server baked into the CPU and tell the OS to go fsck itself.
But in an ideal world ... just because the OS can do something doesn't mean that anyone else can.
"For the small number of applications that still needed updating, we built a feature just for AV apps that would prompt the customer to install a new version of their AV app right after the update completed.”
So Windows is putting up an ad *telling* users to buy a new version of Kaspersky, and Kaspersky are still unhappy. Sheesh!
So Windows is putting up an ad *telling* users to buy a new version of Kaspersky, and Kaspersky are still unhappy. Sheesh!
My thoughts as well - while I'll more than happily bash Microsoft, this "your 3rd party AV software is out of date, we suggest that you update it (and here's a link as to how to)" functionality is generally a good idea. It wouldn't take much to push it towards promoting Microsoft's own services at the exlusion of others but as it is, it's most likely a good thing. Likewise, Microsoft's helping out by covering any gaps in AV support automatically is generally a good idea, particularly when you consider that, unlike the pagmatic techie bunch that lurk here, the majority of computer users really don't care, and in many ways shouldn't have to, and just want their PC to continue acting as a word processor, web browser, video player and game platform. As long as the transition is clear and above board, this is also likely to be a good thing.
Unfortunately most of us here have been on the receiving end of, or observed, Microsoft's considerably less than noble actions in the past... Abuse of trust is not an easy thing to forget or forgive.
As it always was.
Microsoft has no friends in the software business. Only competitors to destroy or consume
anti virus represents another niche for them to colonize.
Although TBF to MS they basically created the AV business in the first place.
With their ongoing inability to write secure code. 2017 and still with the stack overflows?
In its now usual cack-handed fashion Microsoft is possibly attempting to do the right thing here. We know AV software digs deep into Windows, patching hardened APIs and pulling all sorts of nefarious tricks to get itself embedded. To me, that is now an unacceptable risk. If Microsoft is spending time adding parameter validation and hardening the Windows kernel only to have that undermined by an AV tool patching and hacking it all away, then that AV tool needs to be blocked. If an AV tool can patch its way in to intercept whole families of calls, so can a virus.
But Microsoft is its own worst enemy here. The security model they introduced with NT was exceptionally fine grained, and so exceptionally complex. This baffled Windows developers who at the time were used to either a call succeeding or the machine crashing. So Microsoft had us run everything as Administrators and a generation of developers was let off the hook. Unix has a far simpler model, and, thanks to the success of Linux, had to quickly grow under very watchful eyes, whereas Microsoft bolted more and more cruft on: DRM, trust zones, group policies, the .net security model and code signing, assemblies, registry key security and more. Who the hell really understands how all of that interacts? It's no wonder that even now, the security model is badly and inconsistently applied by developers. Much easier to ask for everything.
Now the era of Gates and Ballmer is over (and thank God for that), Microsoft is far less vindictive; but SadNad has replaced the vindictive drive with lumbering cack-handedness and incompetence instead. Not really much of an evolution.
In its now usual cack-handed fashion Microsoft is possibly attempting to do the right thing here. We know AV software digs deep into Windows, patching hardened APIs and pulling all sorts of nefarious tricks to get itself embedded. To me, that is now an unacceptable risk. If Microsoft is spending time adding parameter validation and hardening the Windows kernel only to have that undermined by an AV tool patching and hacking it all away, then that AV tool needs to be blocked. If an AV tool can patch its way in to intercept whole families of calls, so can a virus.
Quite.
If third-party AV products are capable of burrowing deeply enough into Windows to carry out their function, without Windows detecting and preventing this, then third-party malware can do the same.
Which leaves us with a quandry -- we'd like Windows to be hardened to the point at which the malware cannot run, but we'd also like to able to run third-party AV tools. The two are not compatible goals.
The answer may be for Microsoft to produce an official AV Tool API that the third-party AV vendors can use, with some validity checking (code-signing, etc) so that only approved AV Tool vendors can use the API ... but that would need to be done very carefully, as errors in the API validation could lead to a very bad exploit.
(Oh, but I make it sound so simple! In reality each vendor would want a different API with a different set of functions, and Microsoft would end up providing an API that had not quite all the functionality that any of them wanted ... probably with an unforeseen exploit arising from a combination of features requested by different vendors. It is software, after all.)
"The answer may be for Microsoft to produce an official AV Tool API that the third-party AV vendors can use, with some validity checking (code-signing, etc) so that only approved AV Tool vendors can use the API ... but that would need to be done very carefully, as errors in the API validation could lead to a very bad exploit."
Thats how it already works.
"Now the era of Gates and Ballmer is over (and thank God for that), Microsoft is far less vindictive;"
The Ballmer era gave us Windows XP and Windows 7, both far better than the monstrosity we are being force-fed now.
I don't see MS as less vindictive. They've just changed their target from their competitors to their users. They're just as hostile and aggressive as ever, only now they're directing that aggression at the very customers they need to remain in business. Now they're incompetent AND vindictive.
Agreed, Word and Excel compatibles would be okay for a lot of our customers too (they would have to be *very* compatible mind), however, there is no Outlook or Power Point and the Outlook compatibles (admittedly I've not looked at all Outlook compatibles) are lacking in some way or other whether it be a calendar or whatever.
"Very true. Equally true is that I've never yet met a company that uses all the functionality of MS Office."
But they more often than not use ENOUGH. AND they tend to use the stuff that's unique to MS Office such as macros/code. Until someone can find a painless way to translate that code to LibreOffice, along with other complaints such as formatting gaffs, people won't be willing to jump since that code is what lets them get through the day.
It is not about the applications.
It is about consistency. First on the running of the application (by extension it's install). Secondly on the user interface.
Linus and the likes generally have the user interface down. However 90% of people (I assume) are 100% invested in GUI being *exactly* the same. And most alternatives are 90-99% the same at best. People don't want to invest in "learning" the new GUI... unless tricked by the "new is better" next version of Windows/Office (where your already invested, but with Linux it was free, so can chuck it out... try telling your boss to chuck out that £/$300 office licence they wasted on a Ribbon GUI upgrade!).
Linux also, while being great at installing programs and getting dependencies, is more likely to not like your particular audio/graphics/etc setup. Where as Windows seems to somehow blur over any of those problems (I'm not sure if it has them or not, but they seem less noticed) and things "just work".
"Linus and the likes generally have the user interface down. However 90% of people (I assume) are 100% invested in GUI being *exactly* the same."
The same as what version, though? Windows doesn't even offer a GUI that is exactly the same as the previous version of Windows. One of the reasons I like Cinnamon on Mint so much is that it's more like Windows 7 than is any later version of Windows. MS is so determined to tack a phone interface on to the desktop, come Hell or high water...
"time to dust off my old Amiga"
Ugh, if you think Microsoft is a pain to deal with, try dealing with the half dozen or so* competing companies that allegedly support Amiga Software/hardware these days. It's enough to drive you to doing computing on clay tablets with cuneiform!
*The number is always changing due to lawsuits, bankruptcies, buy outs, and just plain disappearing with with your money.
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