I told my brother to sign up for the 3M earplugs scam. He said I was dumb. And I am dumb, but I have tens of thousands extra to spend like a dummy. He doesn’t!
There are plenty of reasons to avoid McAfee products, but I would really question the 30-50% slower. Most enterprise environments have so many pieces of software that slow it down it would be really surprising if AV did that. Even constant scans shouldn’t even come close to that level of performance degradation.
This gets into the weeds on everything in greater detail. But it sounds bad. Really really bad. If you were using essentially any of their products the were gathering all of your browsing information and selling it through a subsidiary they bought back in 2014, a Czech company called Jumpshot that was a rival antivirus company, that they then rebranded as an analytics company. Through that company they sold your web browsing info, anything you looked at through your browser. I guess this was essentially the main function of their web browser extension. Avast claims the would anonymize the information they sold to a variety of clients including advertising, marketing and data analytics companies and data brokers.
The FTC is calling bullshit on this, and they’re saying the company failed to sufficiently anonymize consumers’ browsing information that it sold in non-aggregate form through various products. For example, its data feeds included a unique identifier for each web browser it collected information from and could include every website visited, precise timestamps, type of device and browser, and the city, state, and country. This browsing data included information about users’ web searches and the webpages they visited—revealing consumers’ religious beliefs, health concerns, political leanings, financial status, visits to child-directed content and other sensitive information.
The FTC says the company failed to prohibit some of its data buyers from re-identifying Avast users based on data that Jumpshot provided. And, even where Avast’s contracts included such prohibitions, the contracts were worded in a way that enabled data buyers to associate non-personally identifiable information with Avast users’ browsing information. In fact, some of the Jumpshot products were designed to allow clients to track specific users or even to associate specific users—and their browsing histories—with other information those clients had. For example, as alleged in the complaint, Jumpshot entered into a contract with Omnicom, an advertising conglomerate, which stated that Jumpshot would provide Omnicom with an “All Clicks Feed” for 50% of its customers in the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, Australia, Canada, and Germany. According to the contract, Omnicom was permitted to associate Avast’s data with data brokers’ sources of data, on an individual user basis.
On linux we have ClamAV
Kaspersky, unsurprisingly, turns a blind eye to Russian malware.
Proton is an example of the pro model which is pretty trustworthy, at least in terms of encryption and information security (founder is sus tho, associated with rightists and postliberals it seems).
Linux is frankly a good example of the latter. Not even donations are needed since it’s an open-source project. Completely free, and you are most definitely not the product when you use Linux (unless it’s Android or ChromeOS if you really want to be a frustrating pedant).
I literally benchmarked the build process on 2 identical machines, one with the corporate image and one with a clean one (my manager was installing images for new hires and let me test). It was something like 40 mins vs 1h-1h20. While building on the corporate laptop, there was a McAfee process taking about 30% cpu constantly during the build.
I’ve been reading up on Linux and how it’s the superior OS when it comes to security. I’m thinking about buying a cheap but capable laptop and playing around with Linux systems more. I really like TAILS but it’s … restrictive? I don’t know what I mean, it’s just not something I would be using daily. I’m excited about learning more about Linux systems though.
This was alleged, and never demonstrated or proven.
Tails is not for daily use. For daily use I use Mint. Linux Mint is the best OS for me. I started using it recently and I don’t even want to think about going back to Windows
Have you tried Pop!_OS? Or do you think that one Linux system would be better than another for a beginner?
I haven’t tried PopOs yet. Some distros are easier for beginners than others, linux mint does it very well
Pop os is an excellent all round distro for people of all skill levels imo