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GAOTD & Virus

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Darwin:
Being an educated downloader is one of the best ways to defend yourself. You have to research every application.
-app103 (April 08, 2008, 01:26 PM)
--- End quote ---

Very nicely put! I spent today trying to rescue my friends' notebook and desktop, which are networked together and were both INFESTED with spyware, adware, malware, and trojans. Truly frightening. I stupidly used one of their old thumbdrives to transfer a couple of files from my notebook to one of the two machines. The dratted thumbdrive had a trojan on it! Thank goodness for having good security in place - I subjected my notebook to several full sweeps and reboots AFTER the trojan was discovered and spanked, just to be sure. All is well. Anyway, moral of the story is that these people are fairly computer literate but simply aren't very knowledgable about the perils of living on the virtual edge, as evidenced by the trojan on the thumbdrive, which was literally dug out of the back of a drawer, not having been used in months...

J-Mac:
In my experience with "freeware" download sites - and most that I have dealt with were for handheld device software, primarily Palm and Pocket PC - they have generally had a much larger amount of "bad stuff" packaged with their downloads than more well-known licensed software developer sites. Of course since then I have had more Yahoo junk try to install while being packages with paid software downloads than anything!  (Yahoo Toolbar and Yahoo Music mostly - and I call "junk" anything I don't want hiding in another's installer setup!) I don't know if anyone has ever studied this but the results would be kind of interesting.

....nobody blames CNet or Tucows for buggy software they host...-vradmilovic
--- End quote ---

I do - it's all part of CNET's quest for world dominance!!  (Aren't they Chinese too?!?   ;)  )   -   -   - (Kidding, for any too-serious readers...)

Jim

Carol Haynes:
My pet gripes are the number of time I have downloaded Yahoo, Google (and to a lesser extent Microsoft) search engines and toolbars. Just imagine the amount of bandwidth and time that could be saved if they stopped bundling these in practically every internet download these days. I really can't see how it serves anyone's best interests - the software seller gets a few bucks and pissed of customers, the group of three get pissed off potential customers and I have to uninstall unwanted crap (yet again) because it wasn't made clear in the intstaller! How does that help anyone?

wraith808:
It's the new AOL CD in the mail paradigm.  You remember the days when AOL CD's came in *everything*.  Now these webapps are doing the same thing.  I'm not sure what made AOL stop... but whatever it is, we need to use it on them!

Carol Haynes:
There used to be large scale campaigns against AOL because of the petrochemical mountain of rubbish they were producing - not least large scal mailings of the crap CDs back to them (without postage paid), and skip loads dumped on their entrance.

I wonder if AOL went out of business (or at least sold out) because the CD mailing count cost so much it broke the bank. They were heavily in debt when they stopped.

As for google-crap and yahoo-crap included in everything I suspect the best way to sort the problem is to persuade users to boycott any application the bundles the crap without telling you. There is no reason why sites can't have two downloads - one with crap and one without ... CrapCleaner, for example, does that!

I wonder which donload would be the most popular?

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