AVG can sell your browsing and search history to advertisers

Re:AVG can sell your browsing and search history to advertisers by userbinator on Sunday September 20, 2015 @08:24PM (#10249761)

False positives are the other dark side of AV; here's AVG detecting completely innocuous "Hello World" programs as potential threats:

http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/beginner/67634/

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mingwusers/kFrCqECTY_Y

Along the same lines, it's rather common that keygens/cracks/patches are detected as false positives too:

http://underlore.com/anti-virus-community-creates-false-posi...

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Re:AVG can sell your browsing and search history to advertisers by PhasmaFelis on Monday September 21, 2015 @03:29AM (#10250859)

I think "detected as false positives" is too mildly put. It implies that it's an honest if bumbling mistake, rather than deliberate and malicious FUD.

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Re:AVG can sell your browsing and search history to advertisers by dspillett on Monday September 21, 2015 @04:45AM (#10251090)

> it's rather common that keygens/cracks/patches are detected as false positives

That is unavoidable if the scanning engine is trying to apply heuristics to pick up on attacks (or variants thereof) that are not in its database yet, especially with cracks and other patches: changing the behaviour of executables the way they do is by its nature similar to what viruses and worms are attempting to do.

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Re:AVG can sell your browsing and search history to advertisers by kbenson on Sunday September 20, 2015 @09:03PM (#10249863)

Maybe the Ken Thompson Hack[1] is alive in the wild, or AVG just believes it is. ;)

1: Reflections on Trusting Trust: https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html

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Re:AVG can sell your browsing and search history to advertisers by mattkrea on Sunday September 20, 2015 @09:53PM (#10249991)

That's exactly what XcodeGhost is/was

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