Microsoft Security Essentials Misses 39% of Malware 149
Barence writes "The latest tests from Dennis Publishing's security labs saw Microsoft Security Essentials fail to detect 39% of the real-world malware thrown at it. Dennis Technology Labs (DTL) tested nine home security products on a Windows 7 PC, including Security Essentials, which is distributed free to Windows users and built into Windows 8 in the form of Windows Defender. While the other eight packages all achieved protection scores of 87% or higher — with five scoring 98% or 99% — Microsoft's free antivirus software protected against only 61% of the malware samples used in the test. Microsoft conceded last year that its security software was intended to offer only "baseline" performance"."
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory blast(er worm) from the past...
Is Windows a virus?
No, Windows is not a virus. Here's what viruses do:
1 - They replicate quickly - okay, Windows does that.
2 - Viruses use up valuable system resources, slowing down the system as they do so - okay, Windows does that.
3 - Viruses will, from time to time, trash your hard disk - okay, Windows does that too.
4 - Viruses are usually carried, unknown to the user, along with valuable programs and systems. Sigh... Windows does that, too.
5 - Viruses will occasionally make the user suspect their system is too slow (see 2.) and the user will buy new hardware. Yup, that's with Windows, too.
Until now it seems Windows is a virus, but there are fundamental differences: viruses are well supported by their authors, are running on most systems, their program code is fast, compact and efficient and they tend to become more sophisticated as they mature.
So Windows is not a virus. It's a bug.
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The really good (as in clever) malware don't do any of those things. It's best not to in order to avoid unwanted attention so that your ultimate goal (whatever it be) can be achieved.
Re:In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Windows is malare.
no it's not. stop being dramatic. it only makes you look like an idiot.
How exactly is Windows making him look like an idiot?
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Malware is probably the most precisely written, bug-free software on the planet, bar nothing else. It takes up little memory, runs without being noticed, can run on an extremely large amount of hardware/software combinations and run well.
So, calling Windows malware is really a misnomer. Malware is written to some damn exacting quality standards, and its support (such as the people behind CryptoLocker) is usually better than 99% of the tech support departments in any legit company.
Re:In other news (Score:4, Insightful)
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only a tiny percentage of malware is written well.
Only a tiny percent of Windows is writen well. As well.
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So just to check; Windows is like malware because it's badly coded, but it's also unlike malware because it's badly coded.
I love Slashdot.
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Sounds like Microsoft software!
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It just replicates in more subtle ways which you apparently missed.
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I must disagree.
When the Athlons were new and exciting, the wife bought herself a nice, pretty, new shiny computer from Compaq. Her gigahertz computer ran like a frigging sick dog with Windows XP, whereas, my aging Super Socket 7 machine with XP installed ran quite nicely. Her Compaq was burdened with pre-installed malware from the factory. My own very customized installation of XP, with half the services disabled among other tweaks hummed along nicely, loading web pages while her machine struggled to lo
Norton can't catch the recycler virus 855366bc.exe (Score:2)
On the PDF http://dennistechnologylabs.com/reports/s/a-m/2013/DTL_2013_Q4_Home.1.pdf [dennistechnologylabs.com] it lists Norton as the 3rd best antivirus, with 97% ranking.
But Norton has failed to catch even the most simple "Recycler Virus".
One of my co-worker's thumbdrive has the "recycler virus", specifically the "855366bc.exe", and I tested the Symantec antivirus on several systems (from the 2012 edition all the way to the latest 2014) and none caught that virus !
Perhaps Norton is focus too much on the sophisticated virus and forg
Subject lines are for subjects! (Score:3)
If they made it good they'd just get hit with an antitrust lawsuit.
Yeah, and considering what happened last time, that'll have 'em shaking in their boots.
"Baseline performance" and "failing miserably while lieing to customers" don't mean the same thing. Not catching zero-days is one thing. Only catching ca. 30% is worse than flipping a coin.
Actual Reports (Score:5, Informative)
http://dennistechnologylabs.com/reports/s/a-m/2013/DTL_2013_Q4_Home.1.pdf [dennistechnologylabs.com]
Re:Actual Reports (Score:5, Insightful)
7.2 Threat selection
The malicious web links (URLs) used in the tests
were not provided by any anti-malware vendor.
They were picked from lists generated by Dennis
Technology Labs’ own malicious site detection
system, which uses popular search engine
keywords submitted to Google. It analyses sites
that are returned in the search results from a
number of search engines and adds them to a
database of malicious websites.
In all cases, a control system (Verification Target
System - VTS) was used to confirm that the URLs
linked to actively malicious sites.
Malicious URLs and files are not shared with any
vendors during the testing process.
In other words, you get to take his word for it, and we don't know what failed or why.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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I switched from Avira due to constant obnoxious upgrade offers some time ago. If they've gotten better on that I might reconsider - but Avast works fine if you're willing to whitelist a process and then reboot. I mostly run into false positives with flash drives, so all it takes is unplug and replug in that case. What really pisses me off is, as you say, "yanking the keyboard away" and forcibly removing useful utilities which Norton/Mcafee tend to do regularly without the option to cancel. I've taken to set
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I recall having tried Comodo some time ago, and found that it actually had more options than I wanted. Not that control is a bad thing, but going through a training process where you get interrupted every 5 minutes for a couple weeks by processes asking for permission to run is more trouble than it's worth for me. I like that feature in a firewall, but not so much an AV.
However, I do most of my security on the browser side with NoScript/NotScripts/AdBlock where most of the garbage doesn't even get onto the
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Is it clear that the malicious urls actually hosted different payloads? Or did MSE and McAffee just get hammered by same virus strain 30 times?
I realize that if a strain is common and being missed that it's a big deal, but it does distort the picture greatly if they just keep testing the same "gap" in security over and over again.
There is also the question of what some of this stuff is and whether or not its even within MSE's purview. Kapersky Internet Security and NIS etc are full system protection -- they
Re:Actual Reports (Score:4, Insightful)
However there was catch22 since MSE stubbornly refused to install itself until the infected file was gone and win7 kept restoring the infected file at boot up. The pragmatic developer in me gave up digging further down that particular rabbit hole. I realise I was now also fighting a win7 immune system that the virus had usurped, but I knew how it got in and that was enough to convince me to change the scanner I'd been using since the late 90's. First time in at least 10yrs I've had to wipe my own windows system disk because of an infection.
Why yes, IAACS, but the above is experience with MSE is a personal anecdote, not a professional opinion.
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My wife's family is in Peru, and her nieces and nephews send her emails and such from the Internet cafes. MES has caught everything but one ever since it was first introduced, and that one was only because she accidentally clicked 'OK'. Even then the MES bootable CD cleaned it.
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Almost all AV software is (to borrow a British term) bollocks. One time interval, one AV offering is at the top of the heap. Next time interval, same package is now getting stomped on by other tests, and some tests are not really objective.
Every other OS out there except Windows runs quite fine without AV software. The only reason McAfee is running on the AIX or Solaris box is because it makes the legal eagles happy... and even then, the software only runs when a cron job fires off to fetch updates, then
Re:Actual Reports (Score:5, Insightful)
CryptoLocker has showed that to be the case.
Having been on a team that dealt with cryptolocker, I can say that you are not correct.
Cryptolocker often is sent as malicious executables contained in zip file email attachments, which could target Linux or OSX or AIX just as easily.
you tend to be screwed no matter how good the AV program is,
If the virus is in usermode, the AV can easily remove it no matter what measures it takes, since the AV runs with root privileges. If the virus has root, it depends on what virus and what AV and how recent each is.
The whole premise of "Windows gets viruses because its insecure" is such an absurd myth thats been disproved so many times that its astonishing that people still make such a stupid claim. Go look up Pwn2Own, and see how vulnerable your *nix systems can be when theres a sufficient incentive to break in. Go look up the cross-platform PDF Proof of concept. Check the stats on what type of exploits are used for the majority of malware (OS / third party /browser plugin); I think you'll find that OS-level exploits are quite uncommon these days compared with the others.
...[2]....
Viruses dont do that because there is no financial gain whatsoever to killing a Bitlocker volume.
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For example, there was the whole automatically running software from any removable disk/usb stick thing; hiding file extensions so that users didn't know what was executable; running everything as administrator by default.
The problem was that Windows wasn't designed as a multi-user system and thus didn't have the necessary privilege separation systems that other
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Windows NT most definately was. You are talking about the 15-20+ year old Windows 1/2/3/9x.
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With XP, it was almost the default to run everything as Administrator, so the multi-user aspect was made useless. Also, a surprising amount of software relied on having administrator level permissions. The whole idea of storing data in the same directory as the programs made sure that a lot of software wouldn't run unless the user had full write permissions to the "Program Files" directory.
I think some early bad design decisions hog-tied lat
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No. That is not true. *nix email clients generally do not open attachments automatically,
Nor do windows. Cryptolocker is launched when the user opens an encrypted zip-file, then doubleclicks the "attachment.exe" inside. *nix will not protect you from that sort of thing.
While Windows, and its email clients, are more cautious there was a time when even deleting a email caused it to be opened
Thats inaccurate. There was a security bug with really old versions of outlook (pre 2003) where you could cause that behavior, but it was not a design decision. You could (rightly) criticize that bug, but its not like there havent been code execution bugs in Linux, Firefox, OSX, Safari, etc etc etc. Bringing up ~10+ year old
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Furthermore:
Which suggests that every time a warning popped up, e.g. "This site would like to install MalwareToolbar, Allow/Deny?" they clicked Allow, and every time a site wanted them to download malware.exe, they did and then executed it.
McAfee is worse (Score:2)
Thank you.
Reading that, the more important news is probably that McAfee scored even worse.
L.O.L.
Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
I call bullshit. This seems like a paid advertisement to me. The only reason they used a few undetected ones was because no one would believe anything hit 100%
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Seconded! There's no way in hell NIS performed at this level on a legitimate test. It's shit and that's putting it nicely.
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Sponsored? (Score:5, Insightful)
From page 19 of the report:
What is the difference between a vendor and a partner vendor?
Partner vendors contribute financially to the test in return for a preview of the results, an opportunity to challenge results before publication and the right to use award logos in marketing material. Other participants first see the results on the day of publication and may not use award logos for any purpose.
Do you share samples with the vendors?
Partner vendors are able to download all samples from us after the test is complete. Other vendors may request a subset of the threats that compromised their products in order for them to verify our results. The same applies to client-side logs, including the network capture files. There is a small administration fee for the provision of this service.
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Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
Norton failed to detect itself. That's why it only got 99%.
Re:Bullshit February 2013 DennisTech (Score:5, Informative)
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Sounds about right (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at AV Comparitives, who seem to do pretty good testing, MSE is about 90%. That's quite low (though there are commercial apps that are worse) but the tradeoff is zero false positives on essentially every test.
It's certainly not what you get if you want highest security, but it does a reasonably good job, and doesn't generate false positives, which can piss off newbie users and make them want the AV scanner off. It also updates definitions via Windows Update, if its internal updater has an issue, which is nice for people who won't mind after their AV software.
It's not what I use, but it isn't a bad baseline. I'd sure as hell use it rather than Norton :P.
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Re:Sounds about right (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point:
Defense, of any sort, requires layers. And with enough layers, each individual layer can have quite a significant failure without compromising the integrity of the whole defense. My browsing habits, AdBlock, browser-based malware blocking, antivirus, and OS-level permission limits - all of those protect me. Each one probably only has a 90% success rate, but that combines to 99.999% effectiveness (assuming each layer is fully independent - in reality, stuff that can break one layer is likely able to break some of the others, so it may only be 99.9% effective, which is still pretty damn good).
I use MSE not because it's the best, but because it's the least intrusive. It nags me to run a scan about once a month, and I think only once has it flagged any malware (false positive - I do scans with MalwareBytes every few months, which is much better at detection and removal but does nothing for real-time protection, and it did not find anything). Other than that, it doesn't put any noticeable load on my system or bother me with meaningless alerts - unlike even "good" AV like AVG.
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Geek.com outed this testing firm last Friday for A) running MSE without applied windows updates
I noticed that too while reading the PDF.
But it doesn't seem like much of a defense for MSE's and McAfee's extremely poor showing.
Re:Norton much improved (Score:2)
It is not that steamy bloated piece of shit known as 2007! Other labs report it as one of the best with minimal performance degration believe it or not.
It is re engineered and has a tarnished image like real player and IE which are hard to break.
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It may be wonderful, but based on what happened in the early-mid 2000s I won't even look at Norton. I ditched Kaspersky when I bought a 3 license package for the office, but didn't need two of the S/Ns for a couple of months. When I installed them, I found that the timer on all three licenses expired based on when the first one was installed.
I'm not in a high-risk environment, so I'll stick with defender for the time being.
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I use Avast. This version I use now is pretty good. It is free. If you put it in game/silent mode it wont ever bug you. I notice minimal performance downgrade.
The good news is most AV software is rapidly improving with the exception of McCrappy. True Norton's answer for malware was to encapsolate the whole damn hammer! Worse, may the lord have mercy on your soul if you ran it on Vista! The disk would spin to eternity with indexing and with the whole virtual disk layer encapsulated doing a scam for each damn
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You've obviously not used Norton in the recent years have you.
I swear you nerds are stuck with obsolete knowledge and refuse to accept that things change.
Microsoft Security Essentials was one of the best when it first came out and is now of the worst. Things go both ways.
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I don't understand the point of buying AV software on a non-enterprise basis when a decent program is installed (or downloadable at no charge -- a utility that doesn't throw pop-ups at you demanding subscriptions), the two exceptions would be SpywareBlaster (which updates killbits, adds blocking cookies), and Malwarebytes (which blocks IP addresses.)
The enterprise is a different story. AV software is a must for jumping through regulatory hoops, and something like System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection or S
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I swear you nerds are stuck with obsolete knowledge and refuse to accept that things change.
That's a bit simplistic. It's more like this: remember the bailout General Motors got a few years back? What was it, $500 million, taxpayer money? Then they used it to build a new plant, IN MEXICO! That was the moment I say "Fuck GM from now until eternity!" I will never buy a GM product because of that.
Maybe I'll get an American made car, like a Toyota. Anyway... same idea goes for NIS....
Norton made such awful software for so long that they don't deserve a second chance. I don't even care if they d
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You're right on. Norton is a system hog. It's almost as bad as the malware it guards against.
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I was surprised the last PC that I bought. It had Symantec Anti-virus pre-installed, and I expected to have to go back and delete the services, the folders, and the registry entries that it always left behind. It was surprisingly good about not leaving detritus behind like all the previous versions. Now that they actually have an uninstaller that works maybe they'll work on improving their product next.
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Norton Internet Security received the strongest protection rating in DTL's tests, detecting 99% of the malware used I call bullshit. This seems like a paid advertisement to me. The only reason they used a few undetected ones was because no one would believe anything hit 100%
I can't help but think that if this really were something sponsored by Norton that they wouldn't have had a free product (Avast) score so closely to Norton (which is a paid product.)
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Norton IS 39% of malware! It eats up processor time, ties up an insane amount of memory and is damn near impossible to remove. In Norton's case the treatment is worse than the disease.
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On the other hand... (Score:1)
MSSE vs Norton (Score:4, Insightful)
So, either MSSE misses over a third of malware, or use Norton and your computer turns into a zombie with the performance of a 486 running WfWG...
Hmm, tough choice there.
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Or use avast?
Good detection and minimal overhead.
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In the old days the scanner would still fucking run and take 70% cpu even after uninstallation?!
A re-image was what I had to do and this annoying thing came with adobe flash and was impossible to get rid off. UGH!
They'd get convicted again (Score:2)
If they made a good security product, I'm pretty sure there would be much gnashing of teeth. Remember the uproar because MS dared to include a browser and media player? I'm sure if they put a decent antivirus product in Windows they'd just get sued again.
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MSIE wasn't decent, either. Didn't stop anyone.
In fact, one might assert that providing a worse bundled product was more damaging as it would cut down other vendors and give users a false sense of security. (If this report were even legitimate).
Of course, Defender isn't even bundled (you have to actively seek it out, download it, and install it), so I don't think the "anti-trust!" thing even applies.
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MSSE is not bundled with 7. Defender (which is the same thing) is bundled in 8 and 8.1.
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IE 6 was the best browser. Don't believe me? Go google Slashdot stories on Netscape from 1999 to 2002?
IE as much as I hated MS winning was the browser I kept using as it was more standards compliant and faster browser. It supported MS CSS while no browser supported W3c CSS at all. It rendered more properly code than Netscape and even early Mozilla!
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I was typing that on a phone and didn't have time to elaborate. IE was only popular when IE 6 was light years ahead of Netscape 4.7 in 2001. Netscape 5 and 6 I did not even bother as websites would not even render correctly. Not because the IE era started on the web, but because there were more quirks in thsoe pieces of dinosaur doo than even IE itself!
People use what is best. IE no longer has the strangle hold because it is not the best thing since sliced bread anymore.
In 2001 through 2003 I used it with M
Re:They'd get convicted again (Score:5, Informative)
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Insecure OS? It seems to be holding up with linux just fine at pwn2own.
Figured (Score:2)
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Not that i love MS (Score:1)
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Norton detected 99% (Score:3)
Norton detected 99%. The other 1% is Norton.
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Here's hoping Norton can lift it's game.
Though it's kind of hard to delete a file when it must first terminate the running process.
It is such a dis service to write this and not say (Score:1)
Simpler Explaination (Score:2)
I don't know much about the current state of software viruses (I'm a Linux user!) but my understanding was a lot of them looked for suspicious behaviour rather than straight up definitions.
In that case if I'm a Malware writer it's nice if I can sneak around 3rd party anti-virus software, but it's not essential.
But if Security Essentials is built into Window's and it catches my suspicious behaviour every time, well there's not a big niche for my virus. Just like web developers would make sure their pages ren
Have you ever used it? MSE is great. (Score:3, Insightful)
Missed your chance (Score:1)
Is there a place to download malware? (Score:2)
I used to use http://vx.netlux.org/ [netlux.org] It was a malware repository, everything that had been released and updated regularly.
It was a serious board for everything malware and filled a nitch. The boards country made any site that carried malware (short term) as illegal.
They fought for awhile and now you can see it's gone.
I always deleted the malware I downloaded, those I wish I'd of kept now.
Is there a place to download malware to check ones malware prevention/detection?
And not the EICAR test file.
Thanks
All AV suck (Score:2)
All I want is a program that combines Autoruns [microsoft.com] with StartupMonitor. [cnet.com] and steps in when any Dll or executable is about to be modified, hell, the OS should do that anyway.
Over 5 years I have enjoyed running my PC virus free. and without the annoyance of anti-virus software's constant nagging. VirusTotal for when I'm in doubt [virustotal.com] and a scan with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware [filehippo.com] for when I get a tinge of paranoia.
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I'm sorry but this really looked like a Mycleanpc spam at first glance :)
Would love to see what people use (Score:2)
Would love to hijack this thread and see what everyone uses since /. ers are likely more sophisticated and knowing in their selection than most ....
What some call malware (Score:1)
others call a utility.
MSE doesn't give a damn about Produkey. Every other antivirus I've ran wants to erase it.
I have a program called vfat.com, which was a disk defragmenter for MS-DOS, working only on FAT formatted disks. I have used it hundreds of times for years back in the days of dial-up 2400bps BBS. Now, everybody screams that it's some kind of virus. The damn file predates the Morris worm, and you're telling me that it's a virus, the VFAT virus?
Another program, pskill seems to be on most other a
Re:Oh look... (Score:5, Interesting)
... based on obsolete knowledge from before 2008 and from expired copies not giving the right protection.
Meanwhile, free software ticks along happily needing none of this BS. Funny that.
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The bugginess of free software causes even more problems though.
The bugginess of commercial software made me ecstatic to find free software, in '93. I've also watched clients choose products based on features advertised as current which didn't work until years later.
This entire story points out only one of the massive flaws in one (or a few) commercial software package(s). You should lose your prejudice. Here's one for you: perl vs. Java.
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Really? Android has no malware issues then...?
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Yes, it does try to protect itself from harm, as it should. If you don't know how or why something is, you've no business doing anything to it.
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Yeah, it just needs different BS.
"I just want to install a program, don't ask me for that password gobblegook."
How is that different? Windows does the exact same thing, unless you don't have a password set.
If you're running under an administrator account, you don't get asked for a password, but that's the same thing that happens on Linux under a root account.
I fail to see a reason for your complaint here.....
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Firefox: Disabling Javascript via about:config (Score:1)
"Mozilla, for instance, removed the ability for Firefox users to simply disable Javascript,"
Can you disable it via:
1. about:config
2. javascript.enabled -> Toggle to FALSE
?