CW for SA. Eli Valley doesn’t miss:
CW for SA. Eli Valley doesn’t miss:
Breaking news, analysis, art, and culture from a progressive Jewish perspective. Sign up for our newsletter!
You're viewing a single thread.
So uh, I just tried to visit the link and my antivirus just blocked it:
Should I take this to mean that they're now starting to go even to the extent of blocking websites critical of the narrative? Or was this some strange false positive?
I think antivirus apps are total shit in browsers and I'd never use them for that.
It's just acting as a general firewall? It's not part of firefox at all, like I'm not using it as a firefox plugin or something, and it does the same thing no matter which browser I'm using. If I disable it, windows' generic firewall kicks on.
Surely there are antivirus options to enable/disable it from interacting with browsers. But this is outside my wheelhouse so I hope you get a far better answer from somebody else.
Not exactly my wheelhouse either, but what I'm pretty sure is happening is that it's blocking things at the level of what IP addresses are trying to interact with my device at all. If I tell it not to interact with my browsers, then nothing my web browsers do or connect to will get protected by the firewall and I still want that protection. It's better than the standard windows firewall and has caught some actual nasty things before. I do also use in-browser protection like uBlock Origin, uMatrix, etc. But yes if I'm being a dork which is very possible and anyone else wants to chime in, I'm all ears. I don't mean to derail the thread either though.
I don't mean to derail the thread either though.
As far as I'm concerned - you can have a little derailment. As a treat.
Probably B. Not because the government wouldn’t do that, but because they’re not tech savvy at all.
I don't know that it would even be the government exactly, just whatever tech corporation Avast belongs to. Avast does for sure block the movie sites that stream movies and shows for free which I keep having to whitelist in order to use. Avast doesn't even claim there's a script in those cases, just that the url is on their "blacklist."
You’re right. And that sucks.
Avast is a waste of money and bloatware that comes preloaded on computers. Its not antivirus at all but a drain on your system resources. They love loading this software on machines then giving you a timer that your compter will explode if you dont pay. Its telling you the website is trying to run some Javascript which is something a lot of websites use. Its not a firewall looking up some IP or anything. Make sure Windows Defender is installed because its free and built into windows then remove Avast.
Source: 10+ years in IT from helpdesk to sysadmin to network admin
Thanks, yes I realize it was seeing some kind of script it didn't like but like you said, javascript is something many many sites use which is why I was so suspicious that it was blocking jewishcurrents.org in particular. It's not like it's uncommon for me to visit sites running a lot of scripts lol. Only very rarely will I get an avast warning and block, even less often with "Script-inf" listed as the "infection" type. The only other place that consistently triggers avast are pirate movie streaming sites which I know avast actually blacklists. I'm also using NoScript/uMatrix with strong rules and always selectively allow only the bare minimum scripts needed to load any given webpage.
Anyway, thank you for the advice. I would never ever pay for this shit, I only have the free version but omg yes, avast is such horrid nagware. A couple times a week or so it will force these moving (which makes them hard to quickly close) popups that say shit like "You are being tracked!" with a button to "remove tracking cookies" only for it to bring up an ad for their premium version or other trash software. It's funny since I won't tolerate ads in like videos or on websites at all. The only reason I've put up with avast in spite of my disgust is that a while back someone I trusted told me as bad as it is that it's still better than the windows default and how necessary it is to have at least some kind of antivirus installed in addition to defender or whatever default. I was always skeptical of that though, so I believe you if you say the windows one suffices. I'm hoping soon to get a new (or another used) laptop and will be installing linux on it making the avast question moot.
I'm also using NoScript/uMatrix with strong rules and always selectively allow only the bare minimum scripts needed to load any given webpage.
Modern web browsers are not like ones back in the day that had things like ActiveX that hooked into the operating system and could be an entry point. Really if you look at threat actors that want to get at your data they cant attack you like that. So using something like NoScript or uMatrix does not solve the issue with say browser fingerprinting. It being the main choice for browser based attacks these days. It might actually exacerbate your issues by making you look like a person wearing a yellow jacket in a crowd instead of like a gray one with everyone else. In fact the guy that makes uMatrix says you really should be using uBlock origin instead because like the threat profile that is involved with matrix blocking really is not a thing. What you really want to do is make yourself look as inconspicuous as possible.
Ask yourself a few opsec questions such as:
- What is my threat profile?
- Am I trying to prevent a known threat actor or is it more general than that?
- What is my attack surface?
- Is there a way to minimize that attack surface?
Please also consider a few things that protect you. For example most residential ISPs do not give your computer an internet address. You usually get your address from your router. Your router is really on the internet and will not let things talk to your computer because it does not know how to get it to your computer versus other things on your network. That is unless you manually forward the ports for this, and that is what I mean by attack surface. If you have a device that lets you on the internet then its your border and often they are locked down due to years of customer complaints of hacking. Its why most gateways that come with internet for people have a randomized set of passwords on em.
Take some time to look at your situation from the perspective of a threat actor and you start to see your security posture. Also consider that fortune 500 companies pay millions for cybersecurity and it takes only one dedicated threat actor to compromise them. You will not stop someone from coming at you directly. You can only really stop automated attacks from the internet and only then by keeping up to date on news.