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Researcher claims Claude Desktop installs “spyware” on macOS (www.malwarebytes.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 12 points 5 months ago (7 children)

I disagree, it’s definitely sketchy. Going out of your way to install the messaging host for a half dozen different Chromium forks is going out of your way do something behind the user’s back; it’s the opposite of lazy.

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    I imagine it's more of a vibe-coded "make sure the end users have all the files they'll need to be ready to go" prompt, and it's Claude that "decided" to just have all the files from the get-go

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    Ah yes let’s wildly speculate about how they may or may not be writing software.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Is that not what we were doing? I'm not disagreeing that it's scummy that they're installing unnecessary files, just speculating that's it's ineptitude rather than malicious. Hanlon's Razor and all that. Considering the downvotes on my comment I may have misread your comment.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I was responding to a comment that said “it’s not sketchy just lazy.” Anthropic is shipping a piece of software that shares some of the qualities of adware/malware. I don’t need to know or speculate how that software was written to be able to call that sketchy, and I certainly am going to hold Anthropic responsible for that regardless of how it was made.

    Put another way, if LLMs didn’t exist, and they had an intern write the code in this way, I would still call it sketchy. It might also be lazy! But none of us know how it was written, so I’m not going to speculate on that.

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