I literally just cancelled my McAfee subscription because of annoying constant pop-ups like this. At least this one from Microsoft is a legal notice. McAfee constantly spams you to turn on unnecessary features, and even changes settings periodically to turn things on like “browser monitoring”. Literally worse than old school pop-up viruses.
More importantly, it also never caught a single thing. Windows Defender does fine. My buddy in cyber security suggested them for safety despite how bad they are, but I can honestly recommend you should never, ever, get it. Just keep backups and be prepared to nuke your system if needed, and save yourself a pop-up every other day.
Does your buddy in cybersecurity solve most of his problems by reinstalling Adobe Acrobat and restarting, and if that doesn’t work, muttering about hackers and walking away? Because John McAfee himself didn’t recommend using what the software bearing his name became and was more likely to put a bullet through his PC than install that shit.
While he was living, I don’t think his bullets were most likely to go through another human, but I do believe he was living on a boat because he had to flee Belize (I think?) because we was wanted for murder and couldn’t return to the US because he was wanted for various things there, too (probably including that murder because it was an American).
His advice is only relevant here because his name is on the software, not because he was a good role model. Fascinating guy, but not one to look up to.
The US intelligence community, or a subset thereof, apparently.
I have no idea his personal skill level or knowledge, but without putting him on blast I know his company has been involved in big stuff. He could theoretically focus more on a different aspect of security and have got this part wrong, I don’t know the details of his job very much by design.
He’s in the IC (and so is the other guy who recommended it), so less “sysadmin best practices” and more “stopping state actors” practices, so maybe that has something to do with it. I’ll tell him the Internet thinks he’s wrong and see what he says. He definitely wasn’t saying it was great at the time, just that it was needed in addition to Defender and was way safer than Kaspersky which is basically spyware.
McAfee is worse than a virus. Constant popups asking for money, and not useful at all. Microsoft defender is more than good enough and probably better than McAfee tbh.
Could be. I had the same objections, and brought up how I thought Norton and McAfee were supposed to be garbage. His take was that McAfee had cleaned their act up and was best in class in addition to Windows Defender. I mentioned elsewhere but he’s in the Intelligence Community so he may have reasons he can’t tell me, or just looking at different attack vectors than your average sysadmin. I’ll ask him.
Oh man I totally forgot about this, thanks for the ping.
He said:
"Reasoning? Sigs are only as good as their aperture. McAfee is on a lot of a boxes, catching stuff and creating new sigs. They also have a large staff of very talented people out there finding stuff and creating sigs.
The app does annoyingly keep trying to upsell you.
Do they say why it sucks or is it just contempt for the company?"
Which is a valid question. I didn’t actually see anyone say why it sucks here. Literally everyone just said he’s dumb and outdated, when his original advice to me was:
“McAfee is an industry leader. Not bloatware anymore. Can buy for all your devices including phone (one purchase). Defender is excellent. No one solution is better than layered defense. I run defender, McAfee, and fireeye.
Malwarebytes is good [this was in response to my earlier question], but you get what you pay for.
Kaspersky is sus enough that it’s not permitted on usg or contractor machines.
John is insane and may have killed someone.
He’ll be found dead with a hooker and enough coke to take down an elephant.”
Then months later when I bitched about paying for it and asked if I really needed it, he said I had to get it because the signatures come out weekly.
So actually curious what other people think. I’ll link this comment to other people who pooh-poohed it and ask why.
Sounds like some people I’ve encountered who really don’t know shit, and have just survived on the ignorance and impressionability of others they con into paying/employing them. Then they just Google every problem they’re tasked with fixing.
I recently made the mistake of installing Avast, and it does the same annoying garbage. The actual settings are buried under a metric shit ton of “Did you know that…?” pop-ups that appear every single time no matter how often you select “do not show me this again”, and it constantly urges you to buy the “premium” version for extra features that are literally useless to me.
And it was a pain to uninstall as well. Some files survived the official Avast uninstall AND separate uninstall from the Task Manager, and messed with the Windows Defender, which was unable to recieve updates for a while until I found and nuked the hidden residue of Avast.
I literally just cancelled my McAfee subscription because of annoying constant pop-ups like this. At least this one from Microsoft is a legal notice. McAfee constantly spams you to turn on unnecessary features, and even changes settings periodically to turn things on like “browser monitoring”. Literally worse than old school pop-up viruses.
More importantly, it also never caught a single thing. Windows Defender does fine. My buddy in cyber security suggested them for safety despite how bad they are, but I can honestly recommend you should never, ever, get it. Just keep backups and be prepared to nuke your system if needed, and save yourself a pop-up every other day.
It’s wild to me that anyone uses Norton or McAfee anymore.
Only if
that person wasthe persons pc’s OEM was paid big bucks.Does your buddy in cybersecurity solve most of his problems by reinstalling Adobe Acrobat and restarting, and if that doesn’t work, muttering about hackers and walking away? Because John McAfee himself didn’t recommend using what the software bearing his name became and was more likely to put a bullet through his PC than install that shit.
Okay, but isn’t he also more likely to put a bullet through another human being than anything?
Present tense? No, he’s dead.
While he was living, I don’t think his bullets were most likely to go through another human, but I do believe he was living on a boat because he had to flee Belize (I think?) because we was wanted for murder and couldn’t return to the US because he was wanted for various things there, too (probably including that murder because it was an American).
His advice is only relevant here because his name is on the software, not because he was a good role model. Fascinating guy, but not one to look up to.
Who the heck still uses McAfee! Wow.
The US intelligence community, or a subset thereof, apparently.
I have no idea his personal skill level or knowledge, but without putting him on blast I know his company has been involved in big stuff. He could theoretically focus more on a different aspect of security and have got this part wrong, I don’t know the details of his job very much by design.
I promised in this thread I’d update, then forgot to do so. But thankfully someone reminded me: https://lemmy.world/comment/4948293
Lol, I would like to have words with your friend in cybersecurity
Just one
Total fail on timely response, but here: https://lemmy.world/comment/4948293
He’s in the IC (and so is the other guy who recommended it), so less “sysadmin best practices” and more “stopping state actors” practices, so maybe that has something to do with it. I’ll tell him the Internet thinks he’s wrong and see what he says. He definitely wasn’t saying it was great at the time, just that it was needed in addition to Defender and was way safer than Kaspersky which is basically spyware.
McAfee is worse than a virus. Constant popups asking for money, and not useful at all. Microsoft defender is more than good enough and probably better than McAfee tbh.
Your buddy must be very bad at his job
Could be. I had the same objections, and brought up how I thought Norton and McAfee were supposed to be garbage. His take was that McAfee had cleaned their act up and was best in class in addition to Windows Defender. I mentioned elsewhere but he’s in the Intelligence Community so he may have reasons he can’t tell me, or just looking at different attack vectors than your average sysadmin. I’ll ask him.
Update?
Oh man I totally forgot about this, thanks for the ping.
He said:
"Reasoning? Sigs are only as good as their aperture. McAfee is on a lot of a boxes, catching stuff and creating new sigs. They also have a large staff of very talented people out there finding stuff and creating sigs.
The app does annoyingly keep trying to upsell you. Do they say why it sucks or is it just contempt for the company?"
Which is a valid question. I didn’t actually see anyone say why it sucks here. Literally everyone just said he’s dumb and outdated, when his original advice to me was:
“McAfee is an industry leader. Not bloatware anymore. Can buy for all your devices including phone (one purchase). Defender is excellent. No one solution is better than layered defense. I run defender, McAfee, and fireeye. Malwarebytes is good [this was in response to my earlier question], but you get what you pay for. Kaspersky is sus enough that it’s not permitted on usg or contractor machines. John is insane and may have killed someone. He’ll be found dead with a hooker and enough coke to take down an elephant.”
Then months later when I bitched about paying for it and asked if I really needed it, he said I had to get it because the signatures come out weekly.
So actually curious what other people think. I’ll link this comment to other people who pooh-poohed it and ask why.
Sounds like some people I’ve encountered who really don’t know shit, and have just survived on the ignorance and impressionability of others they con into paying/employing them. Then they just Google every problem they’re tasked with fixing.
I recently made the mistake of installing Avast, and it does the same annoying garbage. The actual settings are buried under a metric shit ton of “Did you know that…?” pop-ups that appear every single time no matter how often you select “do not show me this again”, and it constantly urges you to buy the “premium” version for extra features that are literally useless to me.
And it was a pain to uninstall as well. Some files survived the official Avast uninstall AND separate uninstall from the Task Manager, and messed with the Windows Defender, which was unable to recieve updates for a while until I found and nuked the hidden residue of Avast.
Avast, avg, McAfee, Norton is all just garbage to try get you to pay.