Rocknet

  • Home
  • Residential
  • Business
  • How It Works
  • Contact Us

It might be time to stop using antivirus

Tuesday, 28 February 2017 / Published in news

It might be time to stop using antivirus

Former Firefox developer Robert O’Callahan, now a free agent and safe from the PR tentacles of his corporate overlord, says that antivirus software is terrible, AV vendors are terrible, and that you should uninstall your antivirus software immediately—unless you use Microsoft’s Windows Defender, which is apparently okay.

A couple of months back, Justin Schuh, Google Chrome’s security chief, and indeed one of the world’s top infosec bods, said that antivirus software is “my single biggest impediment to shipping a secure browser.” Further down the thread he explains that meddling AV software delayed Win32 Flash sandboxing “for over a year” and that further sandboxing efforts are still on hold due to AV. The man-in-the-middle nature of antivirus also causes a stream of TLS (transport layer security) errors, says Schuh, which in turn breaks some elements of HTTPS/HSTS.

These are just two recent instances of browser makers being increasingly upset with antivirus software. Back in 2012, Nicholas Nethercote, another Mozillian working on Firefox’s MemShrink project said that “McAfee is killing us.” In that case, Nethercote was trying to reduce the memory footprint of Firefox, and found that gnarly browser add-ons like McAfee were consuming a huge amount of memory, amongst other things. If you venture off-piste into the browser mailing lists, anti-antivirus sentiment has bubbled away just below the surface for a very long time.

Read More…

By Sebastian Anthony (UK) – 1/27/2017, 9:16 AM

Tagged under: computers, news, pc, software

What you can read next

The End of Terrible Wi-Fi Is Near
YouTube TV offers big 4 networks
1.7 Million Cable TV Users Cut The Cord in 2016

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

LINKS

  • Home
  • Residential Service
  • Business Service
  • How It Works
  • News
  • Contact Us
  • Rocknet Customer Portal
  • Rocknet Status

NEWS

VIEW ALL
  • 1.7 Million Cable TV Users Cut The Cord in 2016

    1.7 Million Cable TV Users Cut The Cord in 2016 Pay TV providers lost ...

  • YouTube TV offers big 4 networks

    YouTube has finally announced its long-rumored online television servi...

© ROCKNET 2017. All rights reserved.
RockNet, the grandaddy of all music sites has moved. Click here to go there.
TOP