choaniki

Thoughts on Opera being sold to Chinese companies one of which is the infamous 360 "antivirus" creator?

The founder of Qihoo 360, Zhou Hongyi, created the very first spyware in China called 3721. He later sold it to Yahoo who did shady stuff like drive-by installs of that toolbar (this is back in XP era where UAC wasn't a thing yet) which is almost impossible to remove. This caused websites to break and browsers to crash.

He later quit Yahoo to found the company Qihoo which releases spyware removal software (360 safe) and one of the softwares targeted was Yahoo Assistant.

Of course Yahoo was unhappy and decided to counter tit for tat. Yahoo's next move was to automatically remove 360 safe when users installed Yahoo Assistant.

This led to a long running public court case which Yahoo lost.

IMO, i wouldn't trust my PC's security to the creator of spyware. Some are happy to use his software but that is their prerogative.

Source: http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/10/30/8391853/index.htm