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Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#102
post #94

Software shouldn't uninstall or update itself. There should be a package manager to do this. Then at least you have one attack vector less per application.

The upshot of a gated garden is that it is walled and gated. The downside is that it is walled and gated.

I don't feel gated at all by my linux installation. If I want I can customize everything, but at least I don't have to deal with a thousand installers and update processes on a day by day basis.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#103
post #94

Software shouldn't uninstall or update itself. There should be a package manager to do this. Then at least you have one attack vector less per application.

The upshot of a gated garden is that it is walled and gated. The downside is that it is walled and gated.

There are custom repositories and the ability to install packages from disk

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never a security flaw that a program running with administrator privileges is allowed to do something.

It's a security flaw that too many programs have too many privileges. Windows should have pervasive fine grained permissions like any other modern OS.

Windows has a very fine grained permission system. But as you can see, the issue isn't a lack of this system.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#105
post #98
post #91

Their Teams uninstaller isn't quite as good - it just doesn't uninstall all the crap that the Teams malware has left behind. I still have a stray MS Teams audio device left on my macOS machine.

Did you considered filling a bug report ?

I actually believe in filing as few bug reports to Microsoft as possible, that way they don't have any signals about what to research. Hopefully it'll waste some amount of their resources, no matter how few.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#106
post #94

Software shouldn't uninstall or update itself. There should be a package manager to do this. Then at least you have one attack vector less per application.

When I read the title I had to remind myself what an uninstaller even is. It's been a while since I touched something like that.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#107
post #94

Software shouldn't uninstall or update itself. There should be a package manager to do this. Then at least you have one attack vector less per application.

The upshot of a gated garden is that it is walled and gated. The downside is that it is walled and gated.

Anyone can create a compatible repository to any open package manager. No gates, no walls.

Re: Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware

#109
post #3

And today I learned that Windows supports running Javascript as shell script. huh

And it's even funnier that the solution the author gives is "hey execute this javascript code that uninstalls a program and deletes itself afterwards" like, really? can't you write that in C? I don't think most Win32 apps use JavaScript for their installers.

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