I hate antivirus software with a passion. I've wasted too many weeks of my life hacking around bugs that antivirus programs introduced into my customers' systems.
A couple I've dealt with in the last six months:
McAfee Antivirus causes applications built with Unity 4 to fail when they call WWW.LoadFromCacheOrDownload() on a large asset bundle. This API call downloads a temp file and then renames the file to move it into the cache. But McAfee also opens the file for a virus scan. For a large file, the virus scan may not complete before Unity tries to rename the file, so the rename fails and you never get the asset bundle.
For one client I fixed this by patching Unity's .exe file to add a retry loop on the rename call. Unity 5 also works around this issue with the same retry loop.
AVG Antivirus causes updates to fail for applications that use wyUpdate. wyUpdate calls the CreateMutex() function in the Windows API to make sure another updater instance isn't already running. Bizarrely, when AVG is installed, CreateMutex() returns the wrong value, so wyUpdate thinks another instance is running and bails out. No updates for you!
Going back a few years, I tried NOD32 after some friends recommended it. It seemed fine, except the Alt+Tab key no longer worked. It was a known bug, unfixed for some time.
About 5-6 years ago, McAfee had a known bug - unfixed for nearly a year - than under some circumstances it would erase the entire hard drive. This was the ultimate in virus protection!
> it's rather common that keygens/cracks/patches are detected as false positives
That is unavoidable if the scanning engine is trying to apply heuristics to pick up on attacks (or variants thereof) that are not in its database yet, especially with cracks and other patches: changing the behaviour of executables the way they do is by its nature similar to what viruses and worms are attempting to do.
Years ago, I would have ended a similar rant with "what we need is designs that just don't do things like autorun and view-attachments-by-default"
But now, the "attack surface" has expanded inexorably to the point where the alternative to AV appears to be... none.
So this just seems to be the modern Internet, where the average user is more or less at the behest of rackets not much better than the rackets that control botnets if they aren't actually infected by them.
I've heard some botnets patch the system and expel other intruders. Yes, now, "everything is free... infection and protection equally".
It isn't nearly that simple any more and hasn't been for quite a time.
The Windows security model is not the broken mess it once was when properly used so the key problem is user behaviour particularly home users running as full admin, installing random crap without thinking about it (or simply not knowing any better), just clicking through any warnings they do get, and so forth.
If enough of that sort of user migrates over to Linux and kicks it into working the way they want (i.e. the bad way they used to work under Windows) you'll no doubt see the number of effective exploits balloon massively.
Jeff Wayne's Martians were right:
"The problem is, of course, the humans."
With alternatives like iOS, I feel it's simpler than ever to switch away from Windows. I'm not advocating using their closed ecosystem, but it may have some advantage. Especially for those grandparents etc.
That only works until enough people use an alternative. Then it will be interesting to start searching for bugs and security holes in the alternative. Just look at all the webserver exploits lately. Nothing is bugfree.
Still works now though so it holds true. However for instance Android is used far more than Windows and iOS is getting close and those are still not close the misery Windows is in this regard.
We don't really have a reliable measure of how many attacks are happening on Android and iOS, though. Unlike with a PC, users are much more likely to attribute malware-related problems to 'my phone is just old, I need a new one'. I would attribute this to a mixture of phone commodification (iPhone's appear to be pretty cheap thanks to subsidy plans) and the effects of cloud infrastructure. Users have basically nothing to lose by swapping out phone hardware, because what'll you do, ransom their contact list?
Around 2008 or so I seem to remember Kaspersky writing metadata to every file on the OS when scanning, requiring more frequent (and longer) drive defragging. Nowadays I just use Defender on Windows 8, EMET and browser common sense. Occasionally firing up a sandbox for testing programs. Having NoScript enabled alone helps a great deal in preventing many exploits.
+1 for your comment. I really can't stand antivirus software.Sometimes no antivirus is better than antivirus software.It is another area of software development that is broken and crying for a fix.Who is ready to up this challenge?
For the issue with McAfee interfering with file move calls, Unity was logging an error message that said something like "Cannot move file into cache." That was a good clue that a file move operation was failing.
So I ran the app under the amazing API Monitor [1] and enabled logging for MoveFileA(), MoveFileW(), MoveFileExA(), MoveFileExW(), and similar "move file" APIs. It showed a failure on a MoveFileExW() call with the address of the call.
We'd found that Unity 5 didn't have the same problem (but we weren't ready to migrate to Unity 5 yet), so I also ran a Unity 5 test app under API Monitor and found the same failure on MoveFileExW(), along with several retries on the call until it succeeded. This told me just what I needed to patch the call for the Unity 4 app.
For the issue with AVG and wyUpdate, since wyUpdate is open source I just ran it under the debugger, and as luck would have it, the failing mutex.WaitOne() call was near the beginning of Program::Main() in the C# code [2].
(I mentioned WinMain() and CreateMutex() previously - I was writing that from memory and double-checked it now.)
AVG has a long history of doing scammy things. Starting from pushing toolbars heavily, flagging software that is harmless but poses competition etc. They will never change. Unfortunately, most of the public is not knowledgeable enough to understand this. In Czech Republic many people see this company as a national pride. I have been dealing with that company for a while and certainly do not agree with my fellow countrymen.
The thing that befuddles me is if someone came up to you on the street and handed you $100, you'd most likely refuse until you could figure out what the catch is. If someone offered you free movies or music on the internet, you'd either assume they were stolen or there was a catch. But when people download software that was both complex to build and intricate and expensive to maintain, they assume that there isn't a catch. I don't understand.
I agree but one would expect that AV vendors have enough opportunities to make money without sacrificing their users and their reputation. Look at how many products AVG has. I think they should do just fine by converting free users to paid subscriptions. Couple of years ago most of their revenue came from toolbars. Since then they have converted their business model to push more for premium upsell. They do it well, I don't have problem with such a business model. Free users serve them well as free marketing force, they don't have to abuse them.
Significant expertise is required to install, configure (sound, sleep, 3d accelerators, multiple monitors, printers, scanners, projectors), and maintain the os.
> Significant expertise is required to install, configure (sound, sleep, 3d accelerators, multiple monitors, printers, scanners, projectors), and maintain the os.
Worked out of the box for me (sound autoconfigured, sleep via thinkpad acpi autoconfigured, intel gpu autoconfigured, external monitor via thunderbolt autodetected, one network printer/scanner autodetected via bonjour, other network printer/scanner had driver package from the vendor on the web, were projectors ever a problem?).
Linux does work out of the box if you buy hardware from a company that has a very large corporate install base (Dell, Lenovo, etc).
Linux also works really well if your hardware isn't bleeding edge.
The part where Linux becomes hard to use and requires expertise is learning the new UX, understanding what software and tools are no longer available and figuring out how to live and work with the alternatives that exist.
The degree of technical proficiency that you have is probably relevant to your "out of the box" experience - you are reading and posting on HN, which means that your level of technical knowledge is probably higher than most users given the typical audience of this site.
On one hand Windows is free because it came with my laptop, on the other hand a day of my time lost on Linux is worth more than the $200 Windows license.
Although this is very much about Linux on desktops.
Well, from my short experience with linux, easy things require googling on linux. I was trying to open a port to make remote desktop work. I classify that as easy.
You may be right, googling doesn't take much time though. A Linux system without internet is indeed barely usable. Thos man pages are absolutely unreadable.
chrome is google's tool to control browser apis and to fight apple (viz who is attempting to move app-like functionality into the browser, vs who is keeping that inside apps for their leading app store). It also gives them various other capabilities: monitoring browsing (site suggestion), monitoring ssl cert corruption, etc. And it's their attempt to replace the OS with a browser ala chromeos.
safari is similar: apple's ability to control the internet and how it evolves, including veto power over apis that strategically threaten their business
so too ie/edge, both historically (stifling development of js and internet apis, activex) and now with their still leading os marketshare
and even firefox only lives as long as yahoo, microsoft, or google find them useful, since one of those three basically pays all the bills with search revshare deals. So you could consider even ff as their bulwark against being recognized as a monopoly
The general public doesn't make a distinction between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech. Browsers are free, as far as the general public are concerned.
The general public also has no idea how difficult it is to make software. Frequently even programmers don't see software as that difficult - witness how many times someone has to raise the 'mythical man-month' or similar.
I love IntelliJ IDEA and it's forks so I wasn't really that upset about any of those licensing changes, well other than requiring an internet connection. You know sometimes I'm going to want to do work when I don't have internet on, like on the train to work or while waiting for my daughter to finish her music lessons.
Original link was to slashdot, I think. AVG said "Could be a Trojan Horse Host" and then gave me a cheerful green bar and said, "Threat has been successfully removed."
I might have read that wrong but did you just blame 'gay activists' for existing problems with Firefox that not only existed and were planned for release before he was ousted but had nothing to do with his direct control anyway?
Yup, now we all have to download and run extension "Disable Pocket" in order to not have third party commercial services embedded directly into freshly downloaded Firefox. Its soon time for me to give the Palemoon distribution another go, at least its maintainer seem principled.
AVG is clearly circling the drain at this point and doing anything and everything to squeeze out as much revenue as possible before the music stops. Another example is AVG Secure Search, which is effectively malware snuck in with AVG installs. I recently spent a good many hours trying to get it off of my wife's computer, since it doesn't have an uninstaller and the removal tool they provide on their website doesn't work (or at least didn't on her machine). In fact, in researching the issue I came across multiple cases where it not only didn't work, it also deleted people's bookmarks. The program also appears to use common malware techniques to prevent manual removal. And of course, this kind of thing has been going on for years, and the company gives no impression of caring. It really seems like they're now using their experience with malware to... create malware.
There is no shortage of scammy software companies like AVG, but what always cracked me up about AVG was their logo. Do you think it's a coincidence that it bears a strong resemblance to the Windows logo?? Why might that be, hmmmm? Maybe so a bunch of unsophisticated users get the impression it's a real product somehow related to Microsoft?
The company is a joke like all the other toolbar companies. I wrote to a number of financial journalists at the WSJ a few years ago begging them to write an expose on these firms and Google's compliance in allowing them to exist. No one ever wrote me back.
When AVG was first launched it was a great AV product. Now, like most services have gone the evil direction. It became pretty obvious they went downhill after directing people who want the free version to buy their other products.
I've been uninstalling AVG and replacing it with Microsoft Security Essentials. I know a lot people will be upset over that because [their favorite AV] catches X% more viruses and malware than MSE. But you know what - MSE is light, made by the same company who made the OS, and catches most of the common viruses.
Who the hell uses an anti-virus in 2015? Those things slow down your PC by like 20% for almost no benefit at all. Just don't open suspicious executables (e.g. from torrents), keep your OS and tools up to date and lock your browser down when it comes to plugins and JS execution.
My wife constantly gets all sorts of crap on her machine. I have tried to explain to her the difference between popups that says she has a virus on her computer and OS alerts, but it just goes right over her head.
I think 20% is a pessimistic number, I've seen cases of over 50%. A friends computer (quite decent, i5 8gb) was slow to the point of not being usable at all, opening word would take like 30 sec of disk thrashing. He was on the verge of throwing it out when I took a look at it and uninstalled his antivirus, it became like brand new again.
Well, a couple of years ago I was hit by a drive-by virus. Just opening a website in (up to date) Firefox literally opened .exe files on my PC and infected the entire OS. I burnt my hands once - not again. This might be an anecdote to you but boy that scarred me - the idea that clicking a link could compromise my entire system like that.
Even then - an antivirus program is unlikely to stop such an intrusion. It's just utterly ineffective, and I got viruses before despite having an anti-virus. Also, my anti-virus always deleted my hacktools and own programs which was a nuisance. Hence I don't use it anymore.
> Normal people aren't going to be hit by zero-days.
Normal people still use IE. There are definitely plenty of IE zero-days out there that have hit normal people. Mozilla also announced a month ago that an exploit using a FF zero-day was running in the wild.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, it's very good advice for someone who is computer literate enough to not run things they don't trust. Keep your OS and software up to date, uninstall Flash, disable crap that automatically previews files, and stick to doing most of your computing in a good web browser.
Are you using a recent version of Windows (8, 8.1, or 10)?
Do you have automatic updates enabled?
Do you have standard Windows features such as User Access Control enabled?
Do you use the computer with a standard user account as opposed to an administrator (root access) user account?
If the answers to all these questions are yes, I'd say you don't need an antivirus solution. Don't listen to the scaremongers. Microsoft has got you covered.
Honestly, I haven't had antivirus in 10 years and I haven't had a problem (although my windows usage has declined over the years... I mainly just stick to steam now.)
Run updates, don't use browser plugins, stick to applications you trust, and stay away from seedy looking sites when downloading common software. (Sourceforge comes to mind.)
I agree, but only if one uses noscript and requestpolicy, never torrents software, etc.
It's not that MS has you covered, moreso that AV vendors don't really catch new malware that has been mutated, packed, or whatever. So a more in-depth defense is better.
Not to mention that hilariously enough, AVG is literally selling user data now, which is what antivirus is supposed to protect against in the first place.
Depends what you're doing. If you like to play with a lot of risky torrents, then Windows Defender may not suffice. I also don't think Windows Defender does a great job at protecting you against infected removable media either. Avira seems to be pretty good at all of that and light weight.
For risky websites, a combination of Chrome, WOT, ublock origin, HTTPS Everywhere and Sandboxie and/or Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit (zero-day protection) should suffice.
Using a Standard (non-Admin) Windows account and being up to date goes without saying.
if you don't, and you don't do webbrowsing from inside windows then I can't imagine the need for anti-virus.
90% of attacks are trojan horses (fake/embedded pirated software usually) and the remaining 9.9% is browser attacks.
I doubt anyone is defeating your firewall/NAT box to get a direct connection to your windows machine, and even if they did they'd have to find a service they can exploit.
What are you using to run the VM? I've always had issues integrating the host and guest VM nicely in Windows - getting copy-paste working properly, resizing the window, etc.
How is this the same as having to run anti-virus software because the system's (i.e., Windows's) security model is broken?
> jailbreak iOS
Not sure why iOS is even relevant to my comment, since it isn't built on Linux (or even Unix).
> Security starts with the user.
This is true; a user who is bound and determined to hose their system can do it no matter what protections are in place.
But that's irrelevant to the point under discussion, which is how people who do not want to hose their system can keep it secure. On Windows, you have to run anti-virus software (and even the protection that provides is not foolproof), because the system's security model is broken. On Linux, the system's security model is functional to begin with, since unlike Windows, the system was designed that way from the ground up. So you don't need to run anti-virus software, and hence you don't have to worry about what information that software, which has a privileged position on your system, might be sending to others.
> Windows security is pretty good when running as a normal user and having UAC turned on on its full level and binaries validation.
Do you still need to run anti-virus software in this configuration?
> UNIX does have a better security model configuration out of the box, but is just as unsafe for the regular users that just dump stuff into their PCs
Again, I agree, if a user wants to hose their system, Unix won't prevent them. But anti-virus software won't prevent them either.
My point is, what about the user that doesn't want to hose their system? On Linux, it's very simple: use your package manager to install software, and don't run anything that wasn't installed that way.
You don't need an anti-virus if you are only running software from trusted sources, just like in Linux.
Just that trusted sources in Windows means not installing pirated software or that thing a friend gave because it was so cool. Or going to shady internet sites.
All things that will hose a Linux system as well.
Linux package managers are nice until one needs something it isn't there, like it happens to most average users that don't care about about FOSS and forcing themselves to alternatives.
And I never saw a UNIX that would allow to prevent users to install software locally, as Windows does with Active Directory group policies. Although I bet there are some third party commercial offerings for that.
> You don't need an anti-virus if you are only running software from trusted sources
What does "trusted sources" mean in the Windows world? Microsoft itself has shipped virus-infected CD-ROMs in the past.
> Linux package managers are nice until one needs something it isn't there
My sense is that, while this can happen, it's less likely to happen with the major Linux distros than it is with Windows. Major distros have tons of software in their package managers.
> I never saw a UNIX that would allow to prevent users to install software locally, as Windows does with Active Directory group policies
Um, you do realize that all it takes is not putting the user in the "sudoers" or "wheel" group (depending on the distro), right? This is routinely done in settings where only sysadmins are allowed to install software, such as universities. You certainly don't need anything as heavyweight as Active Directory group policies.
> What does "trusted sources" mean in the Windows world? Microsoft itself has shipped virus-infected CD-ROMs in the past.
Do you also read OpenSSH and Bash source code looking for security exploits?
> My sense is that, while this can happen, it's less likely to happen with the major Linux distros than it is with Windows. Major distros have tons of software in their package managers.
Quantity != Software X that user won't do without.
> Um, you do realize that all it takes is not putting the user in the "sudoers" or "wheel" group (depending on the distro), right? This is routinely done in settings where only sysadmins are allowed to install software, such as universities. You certainly don't need anything as heavyweight as Active Directory group policies.
I can install whatever software I want under $HOME, there is nothing preventing me to do that.
> Do you also read OpenSSH and Bash source code looking for security exploits?
I don't personally, no. But I'm confident that there are experts doing so, and that when they find an issue, it is publicized and fixed quickly, because it's considered an extraordinary and urgent event, and allowing it to continue unfixed would be unacceptable. When MS shipped virus-infected CD-ROMs, nobody thought it was unacceptable, or even abnormal.
However, if you're confident enough in Windows' security features to run without anti-virus software, that's fine. My sense is that the vast majority of Windows users are not. But the vast majority of Linux users are.
> Quantity != Software X that user won't do without.
You're going to have to give specific examples, because I just don't see this as a significant issue that users who don't want to hose their systems have to deal with on Linux. I've never come across any software I needed as an ordinary user that I couldn't find in my Linux distro's package manager. (As a programmer, I have, but that's a different case.)
> I can install whatever software I want under $HOME
Which comes under the heading of users who want to hose their systems. If you don't want to hose your system, just don't do that.
(As an aside, I think you can actually lock down executable permissions in $HOME with SELinux. But I haven't tried it myself.)
Not a given. Where I work, most of the reports I get from security admins regarding compromised hosts (found to be port-scanning, attacking other hosts, etc.) are for Ubuntu systems. You still have to secure any services you're running and take basic common-sense precautions.
And any malware maker and his dog know to bypass it before creating his new malware. How many stories have you heard of Windows Defender stopping ransomware? That's right - ZERO.
With AV you could be infected for months without ever knowing. All it takes is to get infected by anything that hasn't made it into the (often out of date anyway) definitions.
The old school Unix method works very well: Keep a list of all changes made from the base install, then periodically swap the disk out for a blank one, follow your documentation and restore non-executable user data from backup. Also has the benefit of regularly validating your documentation and testing your backups, and allows easy rollback by following the same process for major OS updates or hardware upgrades.
Why did you switch from Bitdefender? I'm forced to "sysadmin" my family's Windows systems ... and last I looked, Bitdefender seemed to do a good job. Was I wrong to recommend?
Is there any "good" antivirus? I personally don't use any antivirus software, but I usually install Microsoft Security Essentials for not-quite-tech-savvy family members.
It used to be that government would go after those for deceived people for money. Bait-and-switch is one of the oldest form of fraud there is and its fairly easy to do with 40 pages "policy" written in legalize.
Well, the government isn't being effective against the true criminals here (the virus developers), and anti-virus isn't free, and government isn't subsidising AV software. Something's gotta give.
I found the Wired article by using the 'web' link we added last week to search on the title (which I had to modify a bit). If anyone can suggest a better URL, we'll change it again.
So how much did you pay for your GPL software? Or for posting your comment? Do you expect to pay with your privacy for those?
For sure there's no free lunch, but I believe you're making it too easy for AVG. An antivirus is a piece of software one normally trusts. It's a shame if this trust is misused. And let's not deceive ourselves that users will attempt to understand fully the technical stuff behind the data privacy statement they put out. While trivial for an IT person, the jargon will not be understood by non-techies.
The “If you aren't paying you are the product” is an anachronistic and ignorant trope leveraged in fanfolk wars. It excuses those things that are paid for and are further monetised. Take for example your music purchases and a “You might like...” suggestion list; you have paid for the system, purchased music, and surprisingly your purchases are being tracked and further monetisation is attempted. Vast troves of interaction data is accumulated and analysed ad infinitum[1].
Free lunches _do_ exist as well, as anyone with a good friend or child will attest to.
The slogans of hypercapitalism are rampant, none of which do justice to the complexities of context.
[1] Yes Apple is included in this, as we know from the extensive market research revealed via the Samsung lawsuit and the fact that Ping no longer exists.
"If you aren't paying, you're the product" is exactly correct when dealing with commercial software, GPL and otherwise. That's the idea behind the word "commercial." Commerce is taking place and somebody is making money, whether by offering paid support for GPL software at one end of the spectrum or by selling you out to advertisers at the other end.
I distinctly remember opting in to Apple's music suggestion service. Was that true for AVG's customers?
There's one problem with that philosophy. You can pay for a product and still be the product. If a product wants your information, there's a pretty good chance it will be sold to 3rd parties.
Windows 10 is a good example. It's trying to catch up with Facebook and Google with its new data sharing policies, even though you pay for the product. At least the setting were in 1 place.
> Commerce is taking place and somebody is making money, whether by offering paid support for GPL software at one end of the spectrum or by selling you out to advertisers at the other end.
RedHat is a commercial operation that makes money by selling support contracts for GPL software they produce. But I haven't bought a support contract even though I use some of their software without paying anything, so am I the customer or the product?
You're neither. You're not a part of their business model at all.
Your relationship with Red Hat is very different from your relationship with Apple, Microsoft, Google, or AVG. That should go without saying, but apparently it doesn't.
> You're neither. You're not a part of their business model at all.
Sure you are. Platforms have network effects. They're better off if you use their software than if you use Windows, even if you don't buy a support contract.
So the exchange is that you get free software and they get network effects. It's not an adversarial relationship where you have conflicting interests regarding how much they'll be paid or how much privacy they'll take from you, because network effects don't hurt you (as long as the vendor is not a monopoly) -- if you're using the software then they help you.
Sometimes there is a free lunch.
> Your relationship with Red Hat is very different from your relationship with Apple, Microsoft, Google, or AVG. That should go without saying, but apparently it doesn't.
That's the point. "If you're not paying you're the product" is thereby disproved. You can have a relationship with a commercial entity in which neither is true.
Worse, the implied alternative is also wrong. You can be paying and be the product, as you are with Windows 10.
If you want something to take home, it's this: Stop patronizing companies that convert your privacy into their money.
The question whether altruism exists is, i think, beyond the scope of this discussion. Whether my parents loved me is also not relevant, although I can assure you that they gave me things out of love and ostensibly altruistically.
With friends, I think, most people will agree there is reciprocity if not with money but with something else like company.
With children, it is harder to argue without introducing other concepts, but I argue that it is not altruistic and has gene reproduction as the final goal.
If you haven't heard this argument before, you can look into "Genome" by Matt Ridley for a colorful explanation.
“With friends, I think, most people will agree there is reciprocity if not with money but with something else like company.”
Bzzt.
That is where your ideological map is attempting to define the territory.
Not all qualitative expression forms a transaction of quantitative proportions as (hyper)capitalism may have one believe.
I also sincerely doubt the discussion is somehow a debate on altruism, although when lensed through capitalist ideology it leaves few other classes as option.
Again, the slogans of hypercapitalism are rampant, as we have seen with both the “free lunch” and “you are the product” tropes that lay at the foundation of this thread.
Instead, it is likely a discussion of magnitudes and trust.
To an extent, all design insists on data and knowing. Take for example a shoe; we need to know your foot size and some other contexts, possibly such as usage.
Should we know your foot size or is this an abuse?
What if we are a shoe company and choose to register your facets in a database and across our stores? Is this a magnitude of qualia that creates a problem?
Now what if we choose to sell your shoe size to another vendor that may help you with other health choices? Another shoe vendor altogether? A company that isn't a shoe vendor?
Where do we draw the dividing line here on the magnitudes?
I don't pretend the answers are easy or clear, but they certainly seem worth exploring given the context.
Selling browsing data can be a serious issue of course, not the least of which seems perpendicular to the apparent direction of the original business model.
Who are they selling to? Insurance companies that care that you browsed about HIV medication or another software firm interested in security and the types of sites you visit?
Complex stuff for sure, but certainly not something to reduce to a polemic of altruism versus capitalism?
We are almost certainly the product on HN - eyeballs of engineers interested in startups to advertise startup jobs to if not to subtly control the conversation in this area.
This isn't an awful thing but it's absoultely true that we both are the product here.
Unfortunately it doesn't work in the reverse direction. Nobody will stop AVG (or any other company) from selling their paying customers too for additional profit.
Antivirus was one of the main original reasons I left Windows and started to lean to Free Software. In one hand I had the virus, in the other I had the antivirus, both options were terrible.
Personally, I think if they a) are very upfront about this (clearly stated during install) and b) offer a paid alternative then I'd be fine with this. There's actually some synergy if they do things right: you were most likely infected by a site you visited (most likely a malicious ad), so if they also use this data to track sources (which isn't clear) then it could even make for a better product.
Of course if they aren't being clear about the data-for-product swap then I'm not in favor.
Personally, I think if they a) are very upfront about this (clearly stated during install) and b) offer a paid alternative then I'd be fine with this.
To be sure, you don't really know if you'd be fine with this because it's never been tried, and probably won't, because no company dealing user information out the back door has ever given any indication that they are open to giving up even a shred of this business line.
The irony... a product that is suppose to protect you from malware becomes the very tool that engages in illegal and unconstitutional data-mining.
There used to be a distinction between services offered on the web and apps running on the desktop (spyware, illegal). Windows 10 changed all that (along with lots of help from mobile OSes). It's (constitutional) criminal behavior (eula or not) and should be classified as such.
>There used to be a distinction between services offered on the web and apps running on the desktop (spyware, illegal). Windows 10 changed all that
I don't think you've paid much attention, but that had changed long before Windows 10. This is just Microsofts big foray into that dark market. For years other companies have done the same thing.
"I don't think you've paid much attention, but that had changed long before Windows 10."
You basically repeated everything I just said. You see... I do pay attention. Along with "lots of help from mobile OSes", Microsoft's big push into embedding spyware into a Desktop OS has completely changed the game. It has given applications - running on user local machines - license to install spyware (which is still considered illegal under the law).
Granted this is a complicated issue but we shouldn't be so quick to disregard privacy rights we have fought (and died) so long for. When backdoors and spyware are embedded into a person's home computer and/or personal property (from a car to a mobile OS), we have also allowed illegal search and seizure.
A couple I've dealt with in the last six months:
McAfee Antivirus causes applications built with Unity 4 to fail when they call WWW.LoadFromCacheOrDownload() on a large asset bundle. This API call downloads a temp file and then renames the file to move it into the cache. But McAfee also opens the file for a virus scan. For a large file, the virus scan may not complete before Unity tries to rename the file, so the rename fails and you never get the asset bundle.
For one client I fixed this by patching Unity's .exe file to add a retry loop on the rename call. Unity 5 also works around this issue with the same retry loop.
AVG Antivirus causes updates to fail for applications that use wyUpdate. wyUpdate calls the CreateMutex() function in the Windows API to make sure another updater instance isn't already running. Bizarrely, when AVG is installed, CreateMutex() returns the wrong value, so wyUpdate thinks another instance is running and bails out. No updates for you!
Going back a few years, I tried NOD32 after some friends recommended it. It seemed fine, except the Alt+Tab key no longer worked. It was a known bug, unfixed for some time.
About 5-6 years ago, McAfee had a known bug - unfixed for nearly a year - than under some circumstances it would erase the entire hard drive. This was the ultimate in virus protection!