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Comment by beachstartup | Hacker News Reader

the old school version of this conspiracy is the AV software makers were the ones funding the virus creators.

I heard a rumor back in the day that the Chernobyl virus [1] (Also Win.CIH, I think) was released by Microsoft within pirated versions of Windows. At the time I was in high school and just believed it, because Microsoft was the big, evil corporation at the time. Now of course I'm more skeptical, though I still wouldn't be surprised.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIH_(computer_virus)

Thanks for reminding me of that one.

Some bogus design decisions by Packard Bell (no jumper/switch to lock out BIOS flash access) meant two of my machines were written off.

No, they weren't running pirated Windows, though I was on day 204 of my 31 day Paint Shop Pro evaluation.

A friend of mine had a pbell that was killed off by Chernobyl. I was on the phone with him when he booted it up. "I'm going to boot." "Don't do it man." "Nah I'm gonna boot. Here it goes. See it's fine." "Sweet" "Uh oh" "Uh oh?" "Uh oh"

And that was the end of that machine lol

I managed to get replacement motherboards for both under warranty, including engineer call out.

You'd almost think the virus shipped with the computer, the way they responded.

My personal conspiracy theory is that AV software are actually backdoors for the international three letter agencies. For my taste the market is unusually fractured with many of the players coming from the typical spy powernations. Plus it would be the sweetest access door as they are almost always whitelisted and get access to the internet regularly.

Kind of like the religious nutcases being in cahoots with the heathens. Many conglomerates own both health food and junk food brands.

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