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Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

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Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

#441

Post by DoubleMalt »

notahacker wrote: post #285
api wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people these days are bashing Apple and Google for creating walled gardens with their app stores, but this is really the primary reason such walled gardens have taken off. They offer a mostly crapware-free experience. If Linux on the desktop were to get popular, I'd hate to imagine what might happen to the open source Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu repositories.

If desktop Linux was widely requested by the general public, PC vendors and download sites would heavily promote custom Linux builds complete with pre-installed crapware, dubious defaults and quite possibly broken upgrade paths and most consumers would never know the difference. They'd probably have their own whored-out repositories too.

Some people would say Ubuntu already went down this path with the automatic installation of Amazon advertising in a pretty intrusive way (imho at least)

Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

#442

Post by EwanToo »

wiredfool wrote: post #324
rogerdpack wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes unfortunately unless you have adbock installed the "first" results in a google search for "vlc" are typical for the (adware, spammy) sites.

In a clean, private window of safari, I'm seeing 4 videolan results before cnet and others of varying levels of crapitude.

He mentions "adblock", if I google for "vlc" I get an advert for a adware version of VLC above the videolan.org ones.

Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

#443

Post by jiggy2011 »

Silhouette wrote: post #431
jiggy2011 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because often applications need to be able to read and write files that have been created by other programs. Some programs also have features which add functionality to other applications. Sometimes this can be useful , in cases such as lastpass and dropbox but other times they can be bad in cases such as spyware.

Because often applications need to be able to read and write files that have been created by other programs. I challenge your position that this "often" happens. Stop and look at the different kinds of data you work with and the applications you use to work with it. I bet you'll find a lot of your applications only work with their own formats and/or a fairly small number of other common ones such as standard text/gra…

No, I use countless file formats with countless different programs. This is especially important if you want to work in a Unix style.

Friends who do graphics or audio work do the same thing.

This sounds like a complex solution that would require every program to know which other programs might want to interact with it's particular files.

You also have programs like text editors and hex editors which don't necessarily even know which file types they will need to work with.

Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

#444

Post by mh- »

jbk wrote: post #439
robot wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

videolan.org has a pretty confusing name. I bet if it was vlcplayer.com it would get better downloads.

For the same reasons mozilla.org is not firefoxbrowser.com

perhaps not the best example, since the Mozilla Foundation (mozilla.org) runs the Firefox promotions to getfirefox.com.

Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

#445

Post by kybernetyk »

brudgers wrote: post #270
kybernetyk wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In short, a person looking for Partition Magic in 2013 is likely to suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome. I'm asking myself where I could have insulted you to provoke such a reaction.

It's an assessment of your Windows expertise based upon the specifics the experience you relayed, not ad hominem . By your own admission your familiarity with the Windows landscape is based largely on experience gained more than seven years ago and with an obsolescent version of the OS. Dunning-Kruger effects are the result of one believing that they have more expertise than the do. With regards to the Windows ecosys…

> Dunning-Kruger effects are the result of one believing that they have more expertise than the do.

I never said I'm a Windows expert.

Maybe I just hit the worst case scenario or maybe you need street smarts when surfing the web from a Windows system. Maybe being an OS X user made me soft and easy prey. But still - alone that a reputable download source (one of those that pop up on the first google page) tricks me into downloading a custom archiver utility and wraps installers with crapware doesn't really speak for the Windows eco system.

Now it could be an isolated case but then again if crapware spreading wouldn't be successful people wouldn't be doing it. And I doubt that all crapware infections come from Partition Magic downloads on Windows XP.

> I am saying that its conclusion is not that of a Windows expert.

But the thing is that Windows experts are the minority of all Windows users.

Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

#446

Post by jzwinck »

jey wrote: post #310
binarycrusader wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...through extensive vetting and rigorous testing... I wanted to upvote your comment, but then I almost died laughing when I read that. Most Linux distributions are better about it now than they were many years ago, but I still remember being absolutely floored when RedHat had packaged a Perl module with a syntax error some years ago. Same goes for Debian; some of the more "fringe packages" (those of upstream project…

Usually there's a few tiers of packages, with the first tier packages being extensively tested and maintained, and the second tier packages mostly just provided as a convenience. I believe Debian calls the first-tier "main" and the second-tier "contrib" (and Ubuntu calls them "main" and "universe").

I've had breakages in Cygwin's emacs (missing GNUTLS dependency), Fedora's node.js (mismatched version of v8), GCC 4.7 (C++11 ABI regression, widely reported), Fedora 17's sssd (broke network login after upgrade), and perhaps most galling, Fedora 16's cron (which completely failed if you upgraded from 15). That's just in the past year. I don't think any of those packages are particularly niche or stale. I used to think maintainers were making miracles...now I think they're doing just OK.

Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

#447

Post by Silhouette »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #443
Silhouette wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because often applications need to be able to read and write files that have been created by other programs. I challenge your position that this "often" happens. Stop and look at the different kinds of data you work with and the applications you use to work with it. I bet you'll find a lot of your applications only work with their own formats and/or a fairly small number of other common ones such as standard text/gra…

No, I use countless file formats with countless different programs. This is especially important if you want to work in a Unix style. Friends who do graphics or audio work do the same thing. This sounds like a complex solution that would require every program to know which other programs might want to interact with it's particular files. You also have programs like text editors and hex editors which don't necessarily…

This sounds like a complex solution that would require every program to know which other programs might want to interact with it's particular files.

I don't see why. Any application can register its own file types, and gets full access to files of those types by default. Allow for common file types to be registered as well (the OS provider could start with a list) and some basic grouping ("all text files", "all files") and you've got a reasonably sensible underlying model that wouldn't need a lot of exceptions to be manually permitted once set up and wouldn't need to present users with vast lists of types at installation time.

As I said, we're part way there already. Most OSes these days have some concept of "known types" and the applications associated with them. There are already conventions for things like where applications should store their configuration data on each platform. There are obviously app stores, distro mirrors and such that can cope with installing/uninstalling entire applications including all sorts of horrendous dependency management, so incorporating a simple file type system in there as well doesn't seem so hard.

Given the vast potential benefits to system robustness and security of locking these things down properly, I think you're awfully quick to assume the solution would be too complex to be workable. Compared to the horrors of file ownership and user/group systems on various modern platforms, it's practically a walk in the park. ;-)

Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

#448

Post by JanneVee »

mcgwiz wrote: post #363

These products exploit/capitalize on computer illiteracy. That's not something I would personally be proud of, but computer illiteracy is the real problem here. Products like this can ultimately accelerate the correction of computer illiteracy. That correction can come in the form of greater mainstream cultural impetus for computer literacy training, for operating system developerrs to prevent these types of actions…

Why do you think the iPad sells so well?

Re: Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows

#450

Post by flyinRyan »

huhtenberg wrote: post #339
api wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people these days are bashing Apple and Google for creating walled gardens with their app stores, but this is really the primary reason such walled gardens have taken off. They offer a mostly crapware-free experience. If Linux on the desktop were to get popular, I'd hate to imagine what might happen to the open source Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu repositories.

> They offer a mostly crapware-free experience. You must've forgotten Path fiasco, with its quiet uploading of user's full address book to company's servers, which turned out to be - SUR-PRI-SE - a "standard industry practice". Wall garden sanctuary my ass. Same rotten ethics, except far less visible.

As a result, you're now asked if you want the app you installed to be able to access your address book. Do you somehow feel that exe's on windows are more transparent?
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