What new Hell awaits.
My McAfee anti viral software subscription is up in November and I want to shop around to see what's out there to replace it.
McAfee has been ok as a service but they send way to many emails and texts hawkin' more services, for more money of course. And they tricked me into a 2 year subscription last time and used the auto pay feature to pay for it, which ticked me off. Took some effort to straighten that out.
So then, I jumped through the hoops they set up to discourage me from turning off the auto pay feature and did so. Then they sent me emails and messages for months alerting me my autopay feature was off (DUH).
Frankly, I've found them to be a borderline predatory business organization bent on rent extraction and serving their customers fear and loathing if they don't buy every protection gimmick add on they have.
So, I'm in the market.
Anybody have some good advice? Just give me some names, I'll do the rest.
I know Kaspersky is one of the best out there, but banned in the US (quelle surprise). I'm looking for a comparable service that covers my laptop and 2 smartphones for a reasonable price. McAfee wants $120 for one year. They are claiming $269 regular price.
In addition, they require a 2 year commitment and auto pay enabled, plus a Social Security number.
The SS number is a deal breaker. Since I will be paying in advance, with a credit card, why would they need a SS number?
Will they ask for a birth date too?
I smell unscrupulous data mining, strongly.
Thread is open.
Comments
I've always regarded Microsoft
as being the Krupp family for the digital era- selling weapons to both sides, in a war of their own creation (or renting them in perpetuity, these days). They have consistently made products for *decades* now that are easy for the bad guys to attack, so that they can sell recovery and "protection" services. Consequently, I avoid Microsoft products like the plague that they are.
I'll use them in my work environment only because I'm forced to. But my personal computing environment is blessedly Microsoft-free 90% of the time- it is all MacOS and Linux. Used to have a couple of Solaris machines as well, but they burned up with the house, and I haven't replaced them. Consequently, I'm also antivirus-free.
When I am forced to use Windows for some specific task, I run it as a virtual machine under Parallels on my Mac. That way, when the VM develops bit-rot, suddenly decides to BSOD, gets a virus, or does something else unpleasant and unnecessary, I simply trash that VM file and start with a fresh copy of the original VM. This is really very useful in the modern world.
My Windows VMs are all Windows 10 at this point, as well. Windows 11 is far too fragile, and is now becoming altogether too dependent on AI slop. I'm glad that they finally cut off support for Windows 10- their updates typically broke more things than they fixed. I have automatic updates turned off on the original VM, but somehow the damned things still try to take updates now and again- which is when I kill them and replace them with a fresh copy of the original. I don't have time to debug the setup every Patch Tuesday.
Long story short, I'm glad that the bad guys focus the bulk of their attention on attacking Windows machines. What antivirus is best? Beats me. If you are stuck with Windows, you have my sympathy...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
sheesh the extents with which they will go
to dominate our connected activity
.
once I erased the MS logic chain
computer use vastly improved
can almost understand the anti -virus
need on windows platforms but can not
make a recommendation. At least the mac
environment is somewhat unburdened by
all that crap.
What happened to Sima?
Zionism is a social disease
Sima posted a column
last Thursday. Hope a black cat didn't cross her path.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
oops, wrong day
.
thought it was Thursday there for a bit
solly bout the confusion
may be able to get back to the
present after a while-- once I can
figure out the mess I'm in
think the brain was left on the pillow?
gotta go find it
Zionism is a social disease
Not Avast?
https://www.avast.com/en-us/lp-ppc-free-antivirus-gen?ppc_code=012&ppc=a...
"PayPal is evil" -- Max Blumenthal