It is shocking to see a post from Qihoo 360 appear on the official golang blog. This company is notorious for at least the following:
* Their flagship products, "360 Security", provides an alternative Windows-update facility; they take use of this to disguise another product of theirs, "360 Browser", as a Windows update: http://www.ipc.me/360-fa-bu-jia-xi-tong-bu-ding.html (Chinese source)
* "360 Security" was caught cheating in AV software tests: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2919554/tencent-qihoo-antimal.... More interestingly, after the denunciation from the test bodies, Qihoo 360 pretended that it quit the test voluntarily and announced that these tests are no longer suitable for "Internet-era AV software".
* They recently announced a "pregnancy mode" in their router product, due to widespread concern about the effect of WiFi signals on the fetus.
it is impossible to get chinese people stop believe these kinds of things even after they move to america most will continue to believe this kind of stuff. They believe all electronic equipment especially computer equipment give off radiation that is harmful to fetus, to combat this they will wear special maternity clothes that are lined with aluminum foil that acts as a faraday cage. if you ever see a pregnant chinese girl wearing weird overalls this is that special clothing, if you put your cell phone in the pocket it will immediately lose all signal. They also believe cactus absorb radiation and will keep them on their desk.
Not a very effective cage at microwave frequencies what with all the gaping holes. Could just as well be a waveguide channeling more radiation onto snowflake. A segway mounted sarcophagus would be more suitable.
> it contributes to people making stupider decisions and believing dumb stuff
In the cell phone of a Chinese, such messages are ubiquitous. Taking the WeChat app by Tencent Inc. for example, I constantly read messages from my parents sharing such nonsense stories. They wouldn't stop even if you complained as their friends and alumnae shared these constantly. Subjects of the nonsense included but were not limited to: a) pseudosciences, e.g., Japanese scientists discovered that water molecules behaved differently when it was being scolded verbally; b) misinformation, like an explosion occurred or a child was taken by human traffickers, which could not be confirmed or the time of which is not specified at all; c) false/suspicious political/historical rumours which favours their targets (i.e. my parents); d) success stories and other click baits.
These stories were poorly made up but easily spread. Some were made in commercial purposes to attract more subscribers so that their network of rumours could expand. You cannot fight them all. You cannot sue them all. You cannot eradicate them all.
You have definitely NO idea what you are talking about. Chinese government can directly read all your emails and private messages from a Chinese internet company without any legal requirement at all, and leaves no record.
This is slightly off topic, but when my dad couldn't install his printer, he called a random tech company online....
They basically requested full access to his computer, for about $99, and set up his printer, but they also installed a bunch of software, one of the things they installed was Qihoo 360.
This wasn't requested, and it made me wonder whether or not Qihoo pays a bounty for each install to these random companies.
It's been some years since I last used it, but some of the features are:
1) a repository of common (Chinese) software that you can install directly;
2) an alternative windows-update service that seems to work faster than windows's own;
3) a "janitor" tool, for inspecting and disabling auto-boot software, removing software otherwise tricky to remove, and removing temporary files;
4) a driver searching and matching tool that works much better than windows's own, which never worked for me.
I was a bit emotional in my last comment, since honestly, there has been some decent work that went into this software. They also started to integrate free antivirus software at some point, but I have heard a lot of bad things about it.
However, Qihoo 360 is notorious for spying on the user (there are some hard evidences), offering bogus functionality (placebo "optimizations"), taking advantage of the user in their "promotions" of other products from the company (a big, green, "install 360 browser now" button vs. a little, grey "no"), and cooperating with the authority on Internet censorship. It has become very unpopular among the tech-savvy people in China.
Absolutely nothing, it offers crap and it is crap. Just there is standard set every mainland chinese uses (if they're not expats), I often see QQ, PPStream (which at one point ran an open unauthenticated SOCKS? proxy to the world), 360 Antivirus/Suite (which is apparently awful), etc
when my friends want me to clean his/her computer(too many autostart programs and unnecessary softwares installed), I usually install 360 security. It is simply the easiest to use and do not have free equivalent. It may do some aggressive things, but that is the price if you want the good part.
Or you know... just use the in-built security in Windows 8.1. It's fun telling people they don't actually need to install a free AV anymore. They never believe you.
We have a lot of Chinese students that come to the school I work at. All of them have this software and similar installed and it causes nothing but headaches.
They believe they actually need it installed even when the school supplies them with a laptop that has all the necessary protection pre-installed.
Upvoted, it's a legitimate request coming from an existing HN user. But I think you are being downvoted since there is clearly some astroturfing going on the comments to this post.
jsno2, jsno3, jsno4 are accounts created within an hour only to comment positively for Qihoo. Are there any rules on HN against this kind of behavior or can someone ban these fake accounts?
It is. The browser also doesn't complain about the Chinese government SSL certificates used in SSL stripping. As someone who has lived in China for a while now I'm always wary about using any Chinese software.
I am a user of Qihoo 360 softwares like Cloud Storage and Mobile Phone management etc.
In the past(Probably 6 ~ 7 years ago) Qihoo had bad reputation, because it once made its softwares like virus that the user cannot un-install them for competing with the competitors.
After that, I think the company has changed its behaviors that it started emphasizing user experiences. And it also developed an anti-virus and anti-spyware software to be used by the user for free. The company changed the business of anti-virus and anti-spyware softwares in China.
Now I think the company is an good innovative company in China.
* Their flagship products, "360 Security", provides an alternative Windows-update facility; they take use of this to disguise another product of theirs, "360 Browser", as a Windows update: http://www.ipc.me/360-fa-bu-jia-xi-tong-bu-ding.html (Chinese source)
* "360 Security" and "360 Browser" spies extensively on the user, including uploading "suspicious" files for their "cloud antivirus" service, uploading the browsing history: http://www.ce.cn/cysc/tech/07hlw/guonei/201302/26/t20130226_... http://tech.163.com/10/1231/17/6P8I1JPR000915BF.html (Chinese source)
* "360 Security" was caught cheating in AV software tests: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2919554/tencent-qihoo-antimal.... More interestingly, after the denunciation from the test bodies, Qihoo 360 pretended that it quit the test voluntarily and announced that these tests are no longer suitable for "Internet-era AV software".
* They recently announced a "pregnancy mode" in their router product, due to widespread concern about the effect of WiFi signals on the fetus.
Their wrongdoings are uncountable.