this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
355 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
86613 readers
3485 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Many years ago, when I was a PC repair tech, software that would behave like this was generally considered to be malware. Seems a little ironic that they're McAfee ads.
Not really surprised though. That's just how the Windows ecosystem is. I've never seen any other OS constantly support so much weird advertising bullshit all the time.
McAfee has always been more of an advertising application than antivirus. A free version would constantly try to scare you into buying it. A paid version always reminds you that you could be paying more to clean your PC, including showing perfectly normal settings as “potentially unwanted“. Even if you pay for all the bells and whistles, you’ll need to click away constant reminders of how good a job it is doing at protecting you.
But, to be fair, the other big names do exactly the same.
My brother got a new laptop some years back. Norton was pre-installed.
It literally hijacked the system and blocked internet access until the subscription fee was paid. Getting AVG antivirus on the laptop via USB ended up killing that ransomware thankfully.