Palo Alto Networks sends cease-and-desist letter to take down review videos

Palo Alto networks also makes bossware so intrusive that it&#x27;s basically malware. Their VPN software on MacOS, for example, collects tons of system data and starts itself persistently on reboot + cannot be quit unless the user happens to have much-more-technical-than-most-users levels of knowledge about things like sudo and the various plist files work.<p>My own experience, in a couple Twitter threads:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;PaulGowder&#x2F;status&#x2F;1296932684707631109" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;PaulGowder&#x2F;status&#x2F;129693268470763...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;PaulGowder&#x2F;status&#x2F;1296865245521223680" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;PaulGowder&#x2F;status&#x2F;129686524552122...</a><p>Tl;dr: I installed their VPN software on my personal computer in order to get remote library database access during COVID. It turns out that it wanted to know everything about my system and I had to rip holes into configuration files 99% of users couldn&#x27;t even find in order to stop it.

Lawyers sending letters to discourage actions they do not like are fairly standard. I&#x27;ve had attorneys tell me that if you are not getting letters like this, you aren&#x27;t making enough of an impact. And to be clear, this is just a letter - tossing one of these out just to see if it works is an easy tactic because many smaller organizations are terrified of litigation, and will cave to demands even if there is no legal basis for them.<p>Do take the letters seriously... determine whether there are valid legal claims presented. But if there are not, it is a scare tactic, so don&#x27;t stress over it.

The title is deceptive.<p>OP is not some independent site doing a neutral review. This is a competitor pretending to be neutral (and doing a laughably bad job at it; the &quot;referee&quot; is their evangelist).<p>So they basically make a untrustworthy video that (surprise, surprise) comes to the conclusion that their product is better, provoke Palo Alto into a hamfisted knee-jerk response, and now try to drum up cheap publicity by posing as the victim.<p>I have always regarded Palo Alto&#x27;s products as snake oil, so this is not a fan defending their team.<p>That said: This behavior of Orca is reprehensible and you should not reward them with your attention.

&gt; Palo Alto Networks appears oblivious to the fact that the New York Attorney General’s office sued and won an injunction against McAfee from enforcing its contractual restrictions against publishing reviews or comparisons of its products without its consent more than 17 years ago. In enacting the Consumer Review Fairness Act, Congress has also prohibited businesses from including contract terms that prohibit consumers from reviewing products or services they purchase.<p>New York only matters if either party has standing in that jurisdiction. Palo Alto Networks(California) and Orca Security(Israel) would not, however there could be made a case that the video in question resides on servers(youtube) in New York.<p>The argument for the application of 15 U.S. Code § 45b appears to only apply to &quot;form contracts&quot;.<p>&gt; means a contract with standardized terms— (i) used by a person in the course of selling or leasing the person’s goods or services; and (ii) imposed on an individual without a meaningful opportunity for such individual to negotiate the standardized terms.<p>It appears as though the EULA is a form contract and Orca indeed falls under the protections of the Consumer Reviews Fairness Act.<p>EULA: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paloaltonetworks.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;dam&#x2F;pan&#x2F;en_US&#x2F;assets&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;legal&#x2F;palo-alto-networks-end-user-license-agreement-eula.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paloaltonetworks.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;dam&#x2F;pan&#x2F;en_US&#x2F;asset...</a>

Our firewall guy thinks Palo Alto firewalls are really good and I don&#x27;t dispute that they are. But I may just show him this tomorrow morning as, another perspective never hurts.

Dear Palo Alto Networks: There is no way I would have watched that video if you hadn&#x27;t demanded it be taken down. Now having watched it I can see why you want to hide it.

I am grateful to Palo Alto for the C&amp;D. I had them on my radar screen for possible consideration next year on a large project.<p>Now I don&#x27;t anymore. That&#x27;s a bunch of money that will go to someone else.<p>This is the price when you have to defend the technical aspects of your solution with lawyers.

Trustworthiness seems to be one of the most important properties of a firewall company.<p>But this news of a reviewer getting cease&amp;desist nastygram from PANW erodes some of the trust that PANW started with by default in my mind.<p>They&#x27;re not the only company to try to prevent independent benchmarking and reviews, but I&#x27;ve never liked that from any company.<p>Perhaps this could be a learning moment for PANW, and they decide to change some policies?<p>(I actually have one of those big old Palo Alto Networks blue rackmount firewalls right here, purchased with the intention of playing with it, either for ideas for OpenWrt features, or to decide whether to buy a new little one for interim use until I have more time for open source. I&#x27;m not getting much warm-fuzzies from the big blue metal box at the moment, but maybe that will improve.)

Dear Palo Alto Networks,<p>In response to your &quot;<i>Cease and Desist</i>&quot; letter of 4 September 2020 to Avi Shua of Orca Security, we refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram [0].<p>Sincerely,<p>The Internet<p>--<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lettersofnote.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;arkell-v-pressdram&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lettersofnote.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;arkell-v-pressdram&#x2F;</a>

Bear with me here, but what if this entire thing was engineered from the beginning to be a marketing technique? The videos themselves? Marketing. The &quot;we got a cease and desist from a big company&quot; blog? Marketing. The follow-up letter about transparency? Marketing. And it all falls right into the David vs. Goliath story that the tech community loves.

I applaud Orca security to expose the bs that Palo Alto Networks is trying to feed the enterprise security industry - as other comments have said, these are fairly standard, but you could have just not said anything and moved on...instead you come out and explain the situation. I love this transparency!

&gt;In enacting the Consumer Review Fairness Act, Congress has also prohibited businesses from including contract terms that prohibit consumers from reviewing products or services they purchase.<p>[IANAL] if that is true i wonder whether PA Networks exposes itself to counter suit as i think i know at least one similar (in my layman view) case where inclusion and enforcement of a contract provision violating a specific consumer law protection provision was a ground for successful class action. In such a case one doesn&#x27;t even need to actually fight the legal battle themselves, just show it to lawyers with time to spare, and even just mentioning such possibility may be enough on its own.

Thats a silly lawyer move, but I also kind of understand where PA is coming from - the FW space is a crowded, reputation driven world and a lot of classic late 00s companies are struggling to adapt to a less hardware centric space.<p>That said, build better products, don&#x27;t take down crappy reviews. I&#x27;ve had terrific experiences with my PA FW&#x27;s and Panorama isn&#x27;t too shabby as far as centralized mgmt solutions go - I&#x27;d hate to see them throw away all the good will they&#x27;ve built up with stupid choices like this.

The letter is about using Palo Alto Networks trademarks on their website. I think Orca should just change their review to say &quot;Palo Crapo Networks&quot; .... issue solved

At this point in the game, how could anyone ever think that this was a good idea? Palo Alto Networks is already on my blacklist because of how badly their products perform in production. This makes it hard for me to ever consider them again, since it&#x27;s clear that they are trying to purge negative information about their product from my view.

Prisma cloud (the cloud monitoring part) is not a great product. It lags pretty far behind cloud provider capabilities.<p>I also got the email that orca probably sent to everyone in their CRM about this, and while I didn’t need any reason to think less of prisma, I now associate Orca as a competitor and probably an earlier call than palo alto for cloud.

With NSS Labs shutting down today the need for objectivity and visibility into testing has never been greater.

I&#x27;m curious as to what Palo Alto is concerned about with these videos. If they feel they are mis-represented, they can easily post their own videos in response. But no doubt, transparency is a necessity and cease-and-desist letters does no one any good.

&gt;Enter your email once and get access to all videos on our site<p>Are you trying to sell me access to a comparison trying to sell me on your product? Im confused and amused.

A review seems like a textbook case of fair use to me. Not sure where there’s a justification for removing a review in this situation.

Gee, big tech using high paid legal staff to attack and silence others unjustly.<p>Seems like the usual situation to me. :(