Why I am going to boycott Kasperksy - my favorite av

[ayogi]

Please read this article from wired if you have not read this before,
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/

I just cant support a company with such an attitude towards people revolution and privacy, no matter how good their software is.

To quote some passages from the article,

Kaspersky’s vision for the future of Internet security—which by Western standards can seem extreme. It includes requiring strictly monitored digital passports for some online activities and enabling government regulation of social networks to thwart protest movements. “It’s too much freedom there,” Kaspersky says, referring to sites like Facebook. “Freedom is good. But the bad guys—they can abuse this freedom to manipulate public opinion.”

“A substantial part of his company is intimately involved with the FSB,” the tech insider says. While the Russian government has used currency restrictions to cripple a firm’s international business in the past, Kaspersky faces no such interference. “They give him carte blanche for his overseas operations, because he’s among the so-called good companies.”

Every trip to Shanghai’s Formula One race or the London Conference on Cyberspace is another chance to court diplomats and politicians, another chance to extend his company’s influence. And one of his goals is to persuade policymakers to refashion the Internet into something more to his liking—and, as it happens, something more to the liking of the Putin government as well.

He argues that the Internet should be partitioned and certain regions of it made accessible only to users who present an “Internet passport.” That way, anonymous hackers wouldn’t be able to get at sensitive sites—like, say, nuclear plants. Sure, it might seem like we’d be sacrificing some privacy online. But with all the advertisers, search engines, and governments tracking us today, Kaspersky argues, we don’t really have any privacy left anyway. “You can have privacy if you live somewhere in the jungle or the middle of Siberia,” he recently told a confab in the Bahamas.

the values of openness, freedom, and anonymity became deeply embedded in net culture and in the very architecture of the network itself. But to Kaspersky, these notions no longer work: By “protecting our right to freedom we actually sacrifice it! We sacrifice the right to safe Internet surfing and to not get infected by some nasty piece of malware at every step.”

Kaspersky can’t stand social networks like Facebook or its Russian competitor, VK (formerly known as VKontakte). “People can manipulate others with the fake information,” he says, “and it’s not possible to find who they are. It’s a place for very dangerous action.” Especially dangerous, he says, is the role of social networks in fueling protest movements from Tripoli to Moscow, where blogger Alexei Navalny has emerged as perhaps the most important dissident leader and sites like VK and LiveJournal have helped bring tens of thousands of people into the streets. Kaspersky sees these developments as part of a disinformation campaign by antigovernment forces to “manipulate crowds and change public opinion.”

So much more, please read the article.

#boycottkaspersky

 

[Prorootect]

This article about Kaspersky does not change my attitude towards its security products (negative), but that he said, I tend to appreciate ..
Because I'm all for security, not anarchy.

-So Thank you for this read!