You have likely heard of the spat between Kaspersky Labs and Microsoft, in which Kaspersky have filed a complaint with the European Commission stating that Microsoft is purposely disabling their antivirus program. Microsoft replied with their view of this dispute, stating that they do indeed disable antivirus programs when there is a risk that a Windows update would stop the third party antivirus from running anyways. The Inquirer and others were told that as a service to the user they ensure that Windows Defender is activated and on the job to protect them.
Many of us have had issues in which an update causes an antivirus program to lobotomize a valued program or operating system because of false positives, often leading to an eternal reboot loop until you can find the offending update or program. This leads to a question of expectations; is it reasonable that Microsoft test the compatibility of their OS with antivirus vendors, either internally or by releasing an early version those vendors can test? We are likely to see a court case to determine that in the near future, the EC previously ruled against Microsoft in 2004 regarding Windows Media Player as well as in 2009 regarding Internet Explorer (pdf) so we may indeed see another ruling which forces Microsoft to allow users to disable Windows Defender.
"The post goes on to admit that, yes, it does deactivate third party AV, if there is a risk of an update to Windows that stops the AV working anyway."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- New Humble Software Bundle, Artistic Edition
- WDC wants in on Japan-backed consortium to buy Toshiba's chip biz @ The Register
- HoloLens dev transforms Super Mario Bros into AR game @ The Inquirer
- Curiosity Rover Decides, By Itself, What To Investigate On Mars @ Slashdot
- Walmart tells developers to stay away from AWS @ The Register
- The nubia M2, M2 Lite & N1 Lite Smartphones Revealed! @ TechARP
trust in the same sentence
trust in the same sentence with Windows Defender is an oxymoron
Windows Defender is the shittiest AV software still in existence, just check AV-Comparatives.org and AV-Test.org
😛
but they promised “Windows
😛
but they promised "Windows Defender Antivirus scored over 99 per cent detection rates"
Yep, it catches the EICAR
Yep, it catches the EICAR test file 99 times out of 1000. 😉