They say it like its a bad thing...?
Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
371–380 of 468 posts
Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Babylon is the worst of the worst malware. I've never battled tooth and nail to get such supervirus crapware off my computer in my life. Seriously, stay away!
The original Babylon Translator, with the One Click Translation of words in the screen was a very nice and useful product. It's a pity that they pivoted to the toolbar crapware thing.
Probably were no longer making any money when people could translate (safely) all from within Google Chrome!
Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Googling for "vlc", "vlc download", or "vlc player", the top 3-4 results are all to videolan.org. Ads may distort this for some users, though...
Probably the ads. For a while, Google helped made this even worse by paying companies like Dell to set the default search on new PCs to specially-customised version of Google with far more prominent ads that were less clearly distinguished from normal search results.
Wow. Source?
Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Peter Detkin coined the term patent troll and now runs a company that's one of the worlds biggest patent trolls. Irony? Or just people being willing to do anything for money. There are worse motivations.
There emphatically is not a worse motivation that being willing to do anything for money. Do something to ensure there is a little less tragedy in the commons. Please.
Sorry, this is off-topic but surely hatred is much worse a motivation than anything.
Honestly, I'm not advocating money as a good motivator. I go to work and I buy things and I'm happy with capitalism but really, I just spent the last few months working on something I like with absolutely no money in it (and it's GPLed). Money is just there so I can get by and enjoy the really fun things. Just realised how much of a hippy I must sound, but it's true.
Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
#375This is the reason why I don't understand that people say that Linux is for "technical" users while Windows is for regular consumers. In Linux it's easier to install something that in Windows. E.g. to install a CD to MP3 rip program, in Archlinux all you do is: # Search for some mp3 ripper program pacman -Ss mp3 | grep rip # Install one of them from the list that looked ok from the description pacman -S ripperx In Wi…
There's no way 'pacman -Ss mp3 | grep rip' and 'pacman -S ripperx' would ever be considered easier than searching in Google and clicking 'install'
Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
#376So when earlier it was mentioned, I assumed "They have to have a different angle on this; they're a YC company." And seeing a strong thread title and no evidence for it other than "The industry they're in is ridiculously seedy", I thought maybe HN was in rush to judgement mode. So I thought I'd try, you know, installing something. Make your own call: http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/its-not-a...
There's isn't even a cancel button! Hopefully at least the top right X cancels the installation rather than just respawning the popup and requiring manual killing from task manager.
No, and notice the small "Skip all offers" text just below the checkboxes, it's kind of hidden between everything and difficult to see. It took me a while to figure that one out, average users have no chance!
Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
#377Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
#378Man people really are looking for an excuse to hate on PG. One of the 200 companies they've funded does something spammy and all of a sudden it's "YC this", "PG that". It's great to bring it to his attention, but these dudes are the ones building the spam engine, PG was just one of many investors in the company. We can't know how much of this he knew beforehand, but he says he's investigating, which isn't even the po…
InstallMonetizer were in the Winter 2012 YC batch (according to their site & TechCrunch), but they've been around since mid 2010. The YC folks had to know that installing toolbars was InstallMonetizer's business model... surely?
I don't want to hate on YC, I was just very surprised to hear they'd invested in this company, and I'm interested to hear what their reasons were.
Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
#379Y Combinator also funded our solution to crapware. http://ninite.com Basically we automate multiple installers and decline toolbars just like you would. Users range from the nontechnical to NASA. We even have a huge blind user base because these installers are frequently hell to navigate with a screenreader. We make money selling a Pro version with extra features to businesses and school IT departments. It works well…
I'm one of those blind users who absolutely love Ninite. Have you ever considered managing the postinstall, too? I envisioned something which would monitor the %appdata% path where any user-specific data goes, as well as maybe the registry. Any changes get synced back to my shiny new Ninite account to be incorporated into the next install. Clearly this would take a bit of work, but since you're already imposing a selection process on your apps, and a majority of them are already well-behaved in terms of how they manage their data, it doesn't seem impractical.
Ninite is generally the first thing that I run on a new Windows install. Pulling in my data feels like a natural part of this, and if you could get some kind of reasonable implementation worked out -- a background service syncing %appdata% regularly, a simple merge model which simply picks a winner instead of trying to reconcile the changes, etc, at first blush it seems quite workable.
Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
#380There's a public company in Israel called Babylon whose business model is giving away a popular translator software in exchange for installing spyware. They're huge and are planning an American IPO this year. Some people here are saying that it's all a big stack of cards and investors are going to lose all their money, but the analysts are actually saying that it's a valid business model and the company is underprice…
Perion (Nasdaq:PERI) has the same model, also from Israel. There's a whole crop of Israeli companies that have similar businesses, in fact.