The Biden administration announced a ban on Kaspersky antivirus software on June 21, citing national security concerns due to the company's links with Russia.
Do you mean tiktok? Because it's quite a bit more Russian than Instagram is Chinese unless there's some crazy zuck is owned by China conspiracy I'm unaware of.
I had a laptop with it preinstalled, when I wasn't a Linux user yet.
That video by late John McAffee was good. Even though he was a conspiracy theorist from the most clueless kind of libertarians - that kind who think they can go to a Latin American country with corrupt law enforcement and feel like alpha there. I mean, even if they can, one shouldn't mix up tourism and immigration, as they say in Russian.
Not to give too much away. I've had to remove consumer and enterprise versions before.
How enterprise is supposed to go is you get the deletion key. Uninstall restart the machine and it should be gone. Except that didn't always happen. So you would do it again which sometimes worked or McAfee says the deltion key is now wrong, probably because it didn't verify the uninstall. So you had to delete certain files in it's installation folder run regular windows uninstall that hopefully finally kills it. I think at some point a downloaded uninstaller was used but I don't really remember.
Consumer was an "easier" uninstall mostly cus we had a script. Try windows uninstall normally or if that doesn't work get the McAfee uninstaller online, run in command line with options (most of the time it was required and not doing so was an extra unessicsry step). You also had to check other places to make sure you got everything (it was a while ago I forgot what and where) because McAfee still sometimes just keeps running in the background doing nothing (hopefully) but hogging reasources.
Was a while ago so for all I know McAfee got it's shit together, but I would be surprised if they did.
Kaspersky has had some really shifty behavior in the past and even appeared to be working in concert with Russian govt, so imo this is a long time coming.
Tbh, uBlock Origin + brain.exe has been carrying the heaviest load for years for me. Windows Defender would catch 80% of the occasional slips where brain.exe wanted some risks, too.
Nothing replaces common sense, but I've been using ESET for years now and have been really happy. Just the AV mind you, none of the other security suite bs.
If you’re using Windows, the built in AV (Windows Defender) is actually pretty great. Maybe run Malware Bytes every now and then, (as in, install Malware Bytes, run it, then immediately uninstall it again). Between those two (and healthy browsing habits, like using an adblocker, not downloading random .exes, etc) will keep you protected. No AV in the world will be able to fully defend against bad browsing habits, so it all really comes down to that.
But this is Lemmy, so you’re bound to get buried in “just switch to Linux cuz Windows is a virus” stuff. And while that may be true, it’s clearly not the answer to your question.
If we're talking windows, ditch the OS. It's the virus itself at this point. It's like asbestos. We had some fun. It was useful. But now we all know that it is flawed from the start.
The only thing that would worry me is that he doesn't have to love the FSB (used to be KGB), he just has to love not being thrown out of a window enough to comply with whatever they may wish, like oh say a Russian state owned Trojan not being detected by it or something. Not that they're definitely doing that, but the possibility isn't 0%.
I mean it's basically the same reason I don't trust much of the US based proprietary software, just %s/FSB/CIA/g, the only real reason to trust one over the other is if you trust either agency more than the other IMO, otherwise distrust both.
Most of the tech stack is american controlled and that is a security and privacy risk to everybody. From instruction set architecture to control over the social media. To American enemies, American allies.. american's themselves nobody is safe... probably the those that are best at mitigating said risk or take any steps at all are the American enemies.