What we discovered about InstallMonetizer

InstallMonetizer can't in good conscience offer Babylon translation satanware.

Or, to put it another way, if they care one ioda about the enduser experience and staying in business, they should not add Babylon software to their bundle.

Babylon is diabolically hard to uninstall. Even after following instructions found on a number of websites, trying different malware removers and doing about:config on Mozilla, it still keeps propagating - EVEN NOW, months later.

I dare someone to install the Babylon software on their main PC and then try to remove it. Go ahead, follow instructions you find on the Internet. Good luck, you'll need it.

It's an ugly, ugly piece of work.

It's worse than that, actually. Experienced computer users interact with a computer in a completely different way from inexperienced ones; at some point, experienced users develop the ability to do some kind of fast cognitive relevance filter on the screen, so they know which UI elements they can interact with, which ones might be important, which ones aren't, and so on.

Less experienced users can't do that -- they have to read every single word on the screen and make a decision about it. They mitigate this by memorizing specific actions. i.e., "to send an email, first I click in this area, then I click on the blue thing, then I click in that area..." (which is why constantly changing UI is such a problem for them, btw).

So what do they do with installers like this one? They just click "Next" with all the defaults on. The text on a screen like this is no different to them than the text of the EULA that none of us read.

> It's giving devs some opportunity to make a living.

So does writing IT software for the Mafia.

You can stomp on the grey areas all you want on individual points, but you have to really look at the whole picture.

What is the end result of the software they produce? Without marketing buzzwords thrown in to mask the true intentions?

To bank on ignorant users and to leverage that ignorance to increase revenue.

Same people who do the AV browser pop-ups designed to convince your grandma that 'your computer is infected', they are using the same tactics with a different costume. I actually spoke with a spammer last year (I'm sorry 'content distribution network' as they called themselves) and the double-speak was just infuriating, that was all I could think about when reading this.

People pay businesses like mine to remove the sorts of software that IM bundles. From the end-user's perspective, they don't understand how this stuff gets on their computer, and they don't feel comfortable removing it because they don't want to break anything.

Put another way: people "get" this software for free, and then pay other people to get rid of it.

And then other scuzzy companies have built a niche industry around the "PC tune-up", prompted by stuff like this software, charging a lot of money to people who don't know better. And, often all these companies do is run software that has been specifically designed to remove junk software.

A lot of this niche is exploitative, taking advantage of people who don't know better, and it's all supported by the bundling of this crap. That goes well beyond "opinion"; "opinion" might be, "Facebook is crap", but there isn't an entire market built around people paying other people to shut down Facebook accounts. Users aren't "choosing" to install these things any more than someone might "choose" to step on a pile of doggy doo in the park.

IM really isn't your responsibility though, so thanks for getting them to flush out the OSS-wrapped stuff at least.