similarly, I've removed Microsoft from my system.
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Probably a good move on your part. When they try to force windows 11 on me, that's when I will be moving to Linux.
Why wait, do it now.
I jumped ship to Linux when Win 7 died, cause I'd rather be fucked by a rusty fencepost than be forced to use 10, and 11 is right out.
Looking to move an older Windows 7 laptop to Linux this week, any suggestions? Feels like there’s so much.
I've been doing the same thing, trying out distros on an old laptop in anticipation of moving all my machines over to Linux.
Linux Mint is by far the most popular for noobs on older hardware, has a clean if simple interface, and will run on tiny amounts of RAM, so if you have no other suggestions and don't know much about Linux, I'd say start there.
Linux Mint is not Ubuntu, but based on it, so there's a lot of support. As a Windows and Mac user I found the Linux Mint "Cinnamon" desktop environment easy enough to navigate, it's solid in terms of broad hardware support, and there are a LOT of resources if you have questions, want to watch a tutorial, or need a helping hand, all pluses for a noob. (And I don't think I had to touch the command line once, when I had it installed: bonus.)
But the cool thing is that most Linux distros have a "LiveUSB" install, meaning that you can load the .iso of your choice onto a 4GB USB drive, boot off the USB, and take the hardware for a spin without installing anything. LiveUSB means you can try as many distros as you like until you get tired of making USB drives, and all for free.
Somebody else here suggested "Ubuntu" to you without saying another word about it, but there's a lot more to it than that. You still have to pick a desktop environment, for example, and while there's nothing wrong with plain Ubuntu, I honestly don't think that's the most user-friendly distro you could start with.
Try it, see if you like it. Most distros are completely free, including Ubuntu. But if you're just looking at finding ONE to start with, again, try Linux Mint: it's popular for Linux noobs for a reason, it's stable, and even if you find you don't like it, it's a great place to dip your toe in and see how Linux works for you personally.
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Fedora saved my old Windows laptop and it was a pretty smooth switch from Windows for me (though I had a bit of Linux experience). That thing became quicker than when I first bought it haha.
If you just need a general purpose desktop and it's your your first time, I would suggest just picking a popular and stable one with lots of documentation like Debian, Mint or Ubuntu.
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That's the real trojan.
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I’m not sure about the browser, but a lot of malware used to ship with the tor binary and used it to connect to the CNC. I can totally see it ending up in the indicator list.
I love bashing MS as much as the next guy, but this is not completely indefensible behavior given typical user use cases and needs. As long as it’s easy to add an exception of you installed it on purpose.
Yeah I'm guessing this is a false positive based on heuristic analysis, i.e. the TOR program has a lot of the same behaviors as malicious programs. Of course it is more accurate to say that the malicious programs are copying TOR behavior or just straight using TOR code, whatever the case may be.
My main issue is that it kind of shows a lack of due diligence. I assume the official TOR binaries are signed, so the official TOR binaries should be exempted from these heuristic positives. If the binaries are unsigned/have no valid certificates, then I can totally understand the false positive. At that point, the user should know they are installing software that cannot be automatically verified as being safe, and antivirus should never assume that something is safe otherwise. Like you said, for typical users this should be the expected behavior. Users can always undo Windows Defender actions and add exemptions.
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It's defensible only from the perspective that it's safer to flag many innocent apps than to miss something harmful. That said, it heavily punishes many legitimate developers and creators, as documented here. I was personally affected on many occasions and there hasn't been a single one where Microsoft wouldn't admit to false-flagging upon a manual review.
At this point, Microsoft Windows itself can basically be classified as malware
If we define malware as something having functions to harm the user and not only things build soley for this purpose, then of course Windows is malware.
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Dude ms defender used to delete my "Hello World" executables built using visual studio just because they were made by an unknown publisher.
Well maybe you should have become a known publisher before writing any programs.
/s
It flagged your program for being dissident propaganda.
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Classic Microsoft
I've run into antiviruses blocking code I've written just because I pulled in certain cryptographic libs. Literally pulling in some Microsoft cryptography libraries in c# made it think I was writing a crypto locker.
Imo, compared to how prevalent viruses were on older versions of windows, this type paranoia seems to be working
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A little context, one of the larger exit nodes was compromised and would send malware to your computer. The behavior shield probably caught this and correctly marked the program as a trojan, since, by definition, that's literally what it was acting as when connected to that node. More advanced AVs (like malwarebytes) will instead block the malicious connection rather than blanket-banning the entire program.
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This only happens in the latest version btw.
You can still download previous version and replace tor.exe and it works.
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Windows Defender sucks compared to the original Williams version.
How dare they use a non-Edge browser for this!
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