Why does crapware still exist?

[alphanumeric]

What I have noticed more of recently is that when you go to a reputable site to download, like The Official ImgBurn Website the first button you see which appears to be the download is a crapware button, not the download that you went to the site for. It has become hard to find the download button.

I've noticed that too. The real download button or link is often at the bottom of the page.

 

[FuturDreamz]

I swear if I ever become a computer sciences teacher, one of my assignments would be to properly download and install some programs while avoiding crapware.

 

[King Arthur]

Crapware - HA!
My first thought was 8's metro.

Funny you should say that. Lucrative Windows crapware market is exactly why we need app stores | PCWorld

Free speech means people will also get to insult other people, but that doesn't mean free speech needs to go. Along the same line of thought, open platforms mean we get both good and bad software, but that doesn't mean we should move to a closed platform just to weed out the bad software.

Or as Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Anyone who suggests that we move to a closed platform because of crapware pervading through the environment of open platforms is either an idiot or misinformed, supports censorship (whether intentionally or not), refuses to take responsibility for their own welfare, and answers to short-term gains while giving up fundamental user rights and an environment where developers can develop software the developers themselves envisioned.

 

[FuturDreamz]

Crapware - HA!
My first thought was 8's metro.

Funny you should say that. Lucrative Windows crapware market is exactly why we need app stores | PCWorld

Free speech means people will also get to insult other people, but that doesn't mean free speech needs to go. Along the same line of thought, open platforms mean we get both good and bad software, but that doesn't mean we should move to a closed platform just to weed out the bad software.

Or as Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Anyone who suggests that we move to a closed platform because of crapware pervading through the environment of open platforms is either an idiot or misinformed, supports censorship (whether intentionally or not), refuses to take responsibility for their own welfare, and answers to short-term gains while giving up fundamental user rights and an environment where developers can develop software the developers themselves envisioned.

Free speech should extend to and terminate at the point when it impedes other's right to free speech.

Example: Westboro Church.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Ensnare the unwary

What I have noticed more of recently is that when you go to a reputable site to download, like The Official ImgBurn Website the first button you see which appears to be the download is a crapware button, not the download that you went to the site for. It has become hard to find the download button.

I've noticed that too. The real download button or link is often at the bottom of the page.

I've seen that on a lot of sites during the past few years.
It takes longer to find the real download button/link, than it takes to do the actual download.

Also, avoid companies/sites that demand that you install their download manager, "to speed up your downloads."
One time, some place wanted me to download a 20MB manager to download a 1MB file!

 

[Layback Bear]

Right on the money lehnerus2000.

've seen that on a lot of sites during the past few years.
It takes longer to find the real download button/link, than it takes to do the actual download.

Also, avoid companies/sites that demand that you install their download manager, "to speed up your downloads."
One time, some place wanted me to download a 20MB manager to download a 1MB file!

------------------------------
The proper download button to the proper link is where they catch many people.

 

[Night Hawk]

The snapshot of the java installer shows how easy it is for most to get duped into installing "unwanted extras" you don't want and why the smart move is being on the watch to uncheck things found already checked off.

Besides IE addons things like changing your home page, search engine, other annoyances are sometimes more cleverly wrapped with the need to be a little more attentative at just what is being installed when going to try something new out.

Now for closed platforms try Windows CE over something you can install on desktop, laptop, or netbook on your own. That offers very little and certainly has no "java support" for the limited form of IE seen with CE 6.0!

Another thing to keep a watch out for and hopefully maintaining a good av and anti-malware protection at the same time is other "little nasties" thrown into the mix at times! And that isn't just browser hijackers either!

Having never gotten around to installing a number of old XP tools freebies and other utilities being looked at but never gotten to you get into an updated software and suddenly learn there are "bugs" hidden insdie the zip file downloads that were supposed to be system tools and other off freewares. "Surprise! We caught you not looking!" so they thought anyways.

 

[Borg 386]

Even Adobe trys to bundle some things in with the update, although I haven't seen this the last couple times. I noticed that whenever you went to the site, it tried to get you to include something from McAfee in the d/l (some kind of toolbar I believe). It was off to the side so you had to be sure to look at the entire page before hitting the update button. Wonder how many people inadvertently d/led McFubar?

And yes Night Hawk, while running a scan with MSE on some programs I wanted to try out in (which were in zip format), MSE picked out one of them with a PUP bundled in with it. After MSE removed it, the program would no longer install. Fine with me...

 

[gregrocker]

In addition to what's been mentioned about bundled trialware which can earn authors commissions to pay for their freeware, many are also are trying to sneak spyware onto your PC.

Almost any search service, updater or toolbar is spyware that's gathering behavioral information about you which is crunched into data that can be both sold and used by the purveyor.

In addition these may paste ads everywhere you go based on searches or even text you type into emails. Hence when I invited a friend to lunch by private email every ad suddenly became lunch specials at local restaurants. This invasion of privacy pushed me to investigate and with John's help I learned how to Opt Out of Network Advertising tracking ads.

 

[alphanumeric]

I am so tiered of being asked to install the Google Toolbar when installing just about anything that I want to puke. If it's not that its the Bing desktop or toolbar.

 

[gregrocker]

Anything Google which is installed on your PC is the most pernicious spyware. I would uninstall it all, guard against it, and stay signed out of Google sites since they can only spy on you when signed in.

Use the stable search box in Firefox, IE or Opera which won't allow Google search to spy on you. It's the only way I use google, except their maps and shopping searches where I stay signed out.

 

[FuturDreamz]

If it wasn't for Google Reader I'd be able to completely drop Google products.

 

[Night Hawk]

Even Adobe trys to bundle some things in with the update, although I haven't seen this the last couple times. I noticed that whenever you went to the site, it tried to get you to include something from McAfee in the d/l (some kind of toolbar I believe). It was off to the side so you had to be sure to look at the entire page before hitting the update button. Wonder how many people inadvertently d/led McFubar?

And yes Night Hawk, while running a scan with MSE on some programs I wanted to try out in (which were in zip format), MSE picked out one of them with a PUP bundled in with it. After MSE removed it, the program would no longer install. Fine with me...

I'm glad the ME SE did the job for you! I know the updated version now included in Win 8 renamed to WD will find just about anything tucked away they try to slip in on you!

In addition to what's been mentioned about bundled trialware which can earn authors commissions to pay for their freeware, many are also are trying to sneak spyware onto your PC.

Almost any search service, updater or toolbar is spyware that's gathering behavioral information about you which is crunched into data that can be both sold and used by the purveyor.

In addition these may paste ads everywhere you go based on searches or even text you type into emails. Hence when I invited a friend to lunch by private email every ad suddenly became lunch specials at local restaurants. This invasion of privacy pushed me to investigate and with John's help I learned how to Opt Out of Network Advertising tracking ads.

That's a good find there! I know a select number of ISPs also track web browsing habits of their customers for companies as well. The free email accounts are full of crud you don't want and didn't ask for!

Bugs are abundant with a great number of freebies as well as free to try and even sharewares at times. Some are browser hijackers while others are data collectors. You may even run into keyloggers if your system protections are upto par.

With IE the site there found 15 and 83 on the 64bit flavor of FireFox, the WaterFox browser and opted each.

Anything Google which is installed on your PC is the most pernicious spyware. I would uninstall it all, guard against it, and stay signed out of Google sites since they can only spy on you when signed in.

Use the stable search box in Firefox, IE or Opera which won't allow Google search to spy on you. It's the only way I use google, except their maps and shopping searches where I stay signed out.

Googelitis is too familiar and why I've often advised some to avoid Google and use Bing. You often run into ask.com extras for seeing that made the default search as well as the ask toolbar annoyance you leave or be sure to leave unchecked. One of the main reasons I preferred IE 8 over 9 was the loss of the search box where you selected the default search provider there!

 

[HammerHead]

Google Shmoogle

I see I have some comrades in arms when It comes to google. Some thing I have never mentioned before is, I have actually searched the registry and deleted any reference I could find to google. I do it everyonce in while cause googie will slip back in.

Oh, and crapware exists because a large segment of users have crappy practices.

 

[Night Hawk]

Google is notorious for slipping in things! Another often overlooked item as pointed out earlier is all those free addon toolbars for browsers that love to open doors for other things! The best addon if any found over the years for just about any browser which can be a good help in spotting questionable sites is the Web Of Trust tool.

A few other IE security bars can alert you to bad sites fast enough when some place immediately attempts to stuff a trojan on where you can close the browser on the spot when the alerts sounds off still leaves you open to certain extent to other types of exploitations without you knowledge. The AVG toolbar intended to filter sites as well as some others like Clam av's own Security Toolbar can be a help and hinderance at the same time.

Besides the addons and getting back to the main topic the most often caught off guard bombs dropped on you do come through otherwise widely accepted sources! You don't necessarily get zinged right away while the bomb has still been dropped in your lap! The surprises often come later down the road.

 

[Cr00zng]

In addition these may paste ads everywhere you go based on searches or even text you type into emails. Hence when I invited a friend to lunch by private email every ad suddenly became lunch specials at local restaurants. This invasion of privacy pushed me to investigate and with John's help I learned how to Opt Out of Network Advertising tracking ads.

The Consumer Opt-out site linked not only requires enabling cookies, it also requires enabling third-party cookies. Not like it matters much, but the site is an actual online advertisers and they do warn about the tracking capabilities of the cookies. Anyway...

The chances are that the advertisers are replacing the cookie/script based tracking by tracking your browser's fingerprint. No need to install anything on your computer, just let the webserver and your browser duke it out. Here's a write up about the browser fingerprint:

Even without cookies, a browser leaves a trail of crumbs | Ars Technica

And you can test your browser's fingerprint here:

Panopticlick

 

[gregrocker]

The tracking resulting in ad pasting all ended when I started Opting out about a year ago. I only notice it start up on a machine I haven't kept current my Opt outs.

I didn't notice its a cookie but the documentation says that this is how they tell advertisers not to track, under an industry initiative to avoid regulation. So it seems trustworthy.

If you can find any more about it let's air it here. Opt Out of Network Advertising

 

[Cr00zng]

Anything Google which is installed on your PC is the most pernicious spyware. I would uninstall it all, guard against it, and stay signed out of Google sites since they can only spy on you when signed in.

Use the stable search box in Firefox, IE or Opera which won't allow Google search to spy on you. It's the only way I use google, except their maps and shopping searches where I stay signed out.

While I agree with you...

Firefox uses Google's safe browsing service, that shows up in the FF "about:config" as default string:

browser.safebrowsing.reportURL [URL]http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/reports[/URL]?
 
browser.safebrowsing.updateURL [URL]http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/downloads?client=SAFEBROWSING_ID&appver=%VERSION%&pver=2.2[/URL]

The way I've found out about this by setting my default home page to Bing and used a local proxy server on my PC to monitor the traffic. It's been pure incidental, but I've been surprised that starting FF with Bing makes a number of connections to Google sites. As the matter of fact, more connection to Google than to Bing. The only way I could stop the madness is to change the above and other Google server related FF default strings to localhost. I am a big boy and don't need Google tell me which sites I could not visit anyway.

Is this a backdoor Google tracking for Firefox? It's quite possible, especially if you take into account that Google and Mozilla just started a three year contract, worth an estimated $750M. If that's the case, it is not a bad investment that rides on the used to be underdog's back...

 

[Cr00zng]

The tracking resulting in ad pasting all ended when I started Opting out about a year ago. I only notice it start up on a machine I haven't kept current my Opt outs.

I didn't notice its a cookie but the documentation says that this is how they tell advertisers not to track, under an industry initiative to avoid regulation. So it seems trustworthy.

If you can find any more about it let's air it here. Opt Out of Network Advertising

While I have no doubts about your experience with NAI, I just don't trust advertisers.

This is what I've noticed at the NAI opt-out website:



You could also be correct that the cookies are used for not delivering ads, but... Qoute from the NAI website:

Opting out does not mean you will no longer receive online advertising. It does mean that the company or companies from which you opted out will no longer deliver ads tailored to your web preferences and usage patterns.

Like one could tell, which advertisment company delivered the actual ad. Not to mention that they could still collect this information and sell it to other companies that are not members of NAI. There are plenty of them...

Online advertisement in the US is about $40B business. That's a lot of reasons not to trust advertisers with allowing cookies for them...

PS: As a side note... Google tracks all of our activities at this forum via Google Analytics, provided no Ghostery, DoNotTrackMe, etc., used...

 

[M1GU31]

Yea that's why I use filehippo, there stuff is pretty clean and free of crap. CNET is know for crapware,they even offer to install stuff like bablyon toolbar which is annoying to remove on my clients pcs. :huh: See it so often. Lots and lots of toolbars with homepages being changed :huh: Also don't got java installed since it's so vulnerable to infections and advise ppl not to have it installed.