The paranoia about Kaspersky never ceases to astound me. No on has ever shown me a shred of verifiable evidence that Kaspersky products allow Russian intelligence actors to exfiltrate data from their customers. Not a shred. The whole bruhaha about Kaspersky reminds me of Saam Husseins alleged WMDs. The real purpose seems to me to be nothing more than an extension of the US' economic sanctions. OTOH Kaspersky products continue to demonstrably outperform competition in detecting malware and protecting end users with minimal system performance impacts. Kaspersky remains in my opinion and the opinion of many that work in the field of data security to be the best product on the market.
Does Kaspersky collaborate with and provide backdoor access to Russian intelligence? I doubt it. No one has shown me hard evidence of it. Do Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, and a host of other US IT companies collaborate with US intelligence agencies to spy on private citizens both in and outside the USA. You bet your sweet ass they do and everyone knows it.
Fact is, I. DON'T. CARE. if Russia is spying on me. Russia is currently a modern liberal democracy which acts responsibly in it's international relations. Russia is a former totalitarian state that works to protect it's citizens and it's sovereignty an uses it's military power sparingly and responsibly. It's not the Soviet Union any more, and I see nothing to fear from Russia, and only good things can come from building a healthy relationship with Russia as it is today.
On the other hand, the USA is behaving more and more like a police state toward it's own citizens, and like the worst kind of 19th Century European imperial bully state toward everyone else on the planet. Look at how Australian citizen Julian Assange is being hounded to death in Bellmarsh prison, the UK's version of Guantanamo Bay! It's about time the US and it's 5-Eyes allies remembered the principles they are supposed to stand for and protect. Things like individual freedom, and public accountability. I hope it's not too late to turn things around for the English speaking world. We need to remember who we are, who our forebears were and what they lived and died for. I'm old enough to remember when people who challenged totalitarian authority in the cause of freedom would defect from Russia to the United States, not the other way around.
China - well, now, they do scare the pants off me. I own absolutely NO Chinese software or hardware, except for an old Huawei phone my wife won't get rid of. China never stopped being a totalitarian marxist state. They just stopped being a closed economy. They still actively persecute people like me (and, hopefully, you) who are willing to challenge their own governments and political institutions publicly because we actually believe in western democratic values, like individual freedom and public accountability. I think Russia could still embrace a little more of that, but America even more so. The US needs to turn itself around and remember where it came from.
In the meantime, I'm perfectly happy to Kaspersky on my personal use Windows VM.
Full disclosure: I'm not a US citizen. I'm actually a citizen of a small neutral European state that has never been an empire, and only won it's freedom from one in the 20th Century. So I can afford to look down my nose at all the rest of you. At least for the present.
