I love outrage as much as the next edgelord but a) you can turn off Windows Defender if you don’t like it, b) false positives are a fact of any antivirus program, and c) Microsoft corrected it faster than you could even post. You are failing to make it seem like Microsoft acted in bad faith here. Comparing this to running cars over people is hyperbolic.
> you can turn off Windows Defender if you don’t like it
Please tell me how, good sir. Not replace, not turn off temporarily until the next day or the next restart when it turns on again automatically. Tell me, how do I turn off Windows Defender real time protection in a way that I can turn it on when I need it and turn it off when I don't.
As far as I know, It's not possible without 3rd party tools AND in a way that will persist (even after Windows updates).
Even harder is trying to let it scan downloads but not do real-time protection. Every setting I've tried has failed and excluding drives worries me that it might do too much and hasn't consistently solved the performance either. So I still have to flick the whole thing off every once in a while (and it turns itself back on after a few hours, of course).
I had an interesting evening the other day trying to completely prevent Windows Defender from running. In the end I had to change the name of the defender executable as defined in the registry.
Responding to the call to flag the post, I gave examples of impact, and why it's newsworthy and the post shouldn't be flagged just because Microsoft stopped the behavior after the damage had been done.
I was saying "flagged" (note the italicization of the last three letters) in comparison to the news article's use of "flags". Of course this HN post should not be flagged, and I agree that a disruptive false positive by first-party AV (which Microsoft only corrected after several days) is newsworthy.
"this is Microsoft actively removing a competing Web browser" is definitely an allegation implying more bad faith than just Windows Defender had a false positive...
I didn't say they intentionally did it. They were put on notice by top legal authorities, so should try not to even accidentally do things like that again.
That's pre-established as major industry and business news, so it's an additional reason not to flag the post.
Sorry, but even the most well-meaning of people will make mistakes, and it's clear this was an accident with no malice. No need to cast irrelevant aspersions just to grind your personal axe.
