Micro$oft decides what code gets to run on your machine

A couple of days ago I installed the FLTK package for MSYS2 on Windows. That package contained the FLUID interface designer for FLTK as a binary, a binary that I tried to run.

I was not surprised when Windows Defender flagged it as malware and quarantined it for my “safety”, as it’s not a binary that many people download. I don’t like this approach to flagging software, as it results in many false-positives and hurts smaller/indie developers, marking their software as “unsafe” and turning off potential users that might not know better. This ends up pushing everyone that uses a Windows computer into a world of “trusted” Microsoft apps (where they can use whichever criteria lines their pockets better to vet these apps, taking away agency from their users and consolidating their monopoly over home and office computing even more). It also pushes users into using the most popular, shitty and mostly proprietary mainstream applications, since those won’t be recognized as potential malware.

Anyhow, I proceeded to open Windows Defender to put that binary into the exceptions list when, lo and behold, it prompted me to sign in using a Microsoft account!

But the worst was yet to come…

Microsoft was forcing me to subscribe to Microsoft 365! To configure their stupid antivirus that I can’t uninstall in the first place! There was no option for me to skip this. To add insult to injury, some time later I was compiling one of my own Go programs and it quarantined my own binary. Again! I can’t even run my own software!

In other news: water is wet, Stallman was right, the sky is blue and Microsoft is a cancer on computing.