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What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

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Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#281

Post by bentcorner »

Karunamon wrote: post #254
matrixagent wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I only learned recently just how rampant – not even half of the copies of a "App Store best of the year" game were bought. ( https://twitter.com/ustwogames/status/552136427904184320 ) I wouldn't even have imagined so many people would even jailbreak their phones anymore.

Those numbers are somewhat sketchy if I recall right. Apple doesn't allow app authors to have access to an unchanging ID of a device, so if they're doing something like (number of changeable UIDs that touched our server) - (app store sales) = copies we should have been paid for ..then there's a huge problem with their methodology. It would fail on the basic use case of one user with one app store account installing t…

Methodology on Android is also problematic, for the same reasons:

http://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-bad...

Five percent are paid downloads, so the ratio is 9.5 to 1, but a portion of those are people who have both a phone and a tablet, people who have more than one Android device with them. So a small portion of that 95 percent is going to be taken up by those installs.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#282

Post by duaneb »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #41

And this is why Apple created Gatekeeper and made the Mac OS X App Store so ridiculously onerous for developers[1]. The software world is, for all intents and purposes, a thin sheen of gold flecks and diamonds atop a veritable cesspool of shit. You can just imagine the conversation at 1 Infinite Loop: Marketer: The Panic guys are considering pulling out of the App Store. Maybe we should reconsider our App Store strat…

Yes, I can't be mad at the Apple Store for sandboxing. Their pricing model, totally, but sandboxing I want more than any other store feature out there—if I could use it for steam I would in a heartbeat.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#283

Post by hackmiester »

jjoonathan wrote: post #166
_nedR wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you partially. But Apple has taken its own interests into consideration. Apple is not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts - They take a fat cut out of each sale. Have you seen the Debian repositories or the Ubuntu Software center. They have a great selection of software, are easy to use, while at the same time not taking away your freedom or resorting to Orwellian tyranny.

> They have a great selection of software The Debian repositories are great, but don't kid yourself: unless you're a developer, it's very likely that there are at least a handful of mission-critical apps missing from the Linux ecosystem.

Can I get an example? I am considering moving some family to Linux and I couldn't find anything they would be missing upon a cursory glance.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#284

Post by _lce0 »

username223 wrote: post #128
glesica wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has anybody in HN worked with a company which does this crapware bundling, let alone creating? If anyone here has worked for Adobe (Flash included crapware for a long time), Oracle (Java updates used to or still do include crapware), Google (browser toolbar was crapware), or Apple (Quicktime for Windows attempted to install iTunes and Safari), then yes.

Every sane piece of Mac software: download a big disk image (dmg), mount it, copy the application folder to /Applications. To uninstall, drag it to the trash. Adobe software: download a tiny disk image, launch the hideous Adobe installer program, give it root, have it download and install God-knows-what to God-knows-where. To uninstall, open a terminal and go medieval on everything with a name containing "Adobe", "Ma…

Whenever you install Chrome (not sure if other Google product that does the same),

you got GoogleUpdate as ..

  - startup trigger
  - firefox addon (!!)
  - scheduled task
And it's not Google alone, big players are the worst malware distributors as part of they _own_ products

Stallman was ALWAYS right.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#285

Post by duaneb »

jarcane wrote: post #206
Max_Mustermann wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact reason why the first thing I do for a friends computer is installing adblock on chrome. As an aside, I wonder how prevalent the adware would be when searching for "download chrome"?

This. For all that people handwring about "Won't somebody please think of our ad revenue!", I consider installing some kind of adblocker more or less a standard safety measure for the web. A huge volume of browser-vectored malware comes from bad ad clicks, and even I've made a mistake or two in the past clicking on bogus download buttons and the like. µBlock is especially good for this as some of the lists have addit…

And it's not like people with ad blockers would lead to ROI, anyway.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#286

Post by TeMPOraL »

relaytheurgency wrote: post #228
richardwhiuk wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's due to the much smaller install base. As soon as you get any commercial software on linux, you break outside the package manager and start getting closer to crapware (see graphics drivers installation process which is normally 'download this shell file and execute it as root').

At that level (you're using linux, know what 'root' is, how to access root and how to execute a shell file as root) you're being lazy if something like that bites you in the ass.

Which leads us back to the real reason why you don't get malware on Linux - because non-tech-savvy people don't use it. If ever, say, Ubuntu reaches popularity levels comparable to Windows among general population, you'll be seeing tons of toolbars there as well.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#287

Post by api »

ksk wrote: post #271
api wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but ultimately this is a band-aid over the fact that OSes have terrible permission separation and application isolation. If OSes were better architected from a security point of view, it would be substantially less of a problem.

You seem to know a lot more about operating systems design than Microsoft. Why don't you submit a paper?

Microsoft knows far more about operating system design than Microsoft. I'm sure MS research is chock full of people who could design something far, far better than Windows. The problem is twofold:

(1) Convincing anyone in management that developing such a thing would be worthwhile when people are still buying the old thing in droves and when such an endeavor would have a long bootstrap/incubation period before it'd be commercially viable.

(2) Making all the legacy software work via compatibility layers.

Not sure which of these would be harder.

Present OSes have security models rooted in the multi-user needs of workstations and servers in the 1970s and 80s, back when the Internet was kind of a walled garden and security risks consisted mostly of students and kids playing around.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#288

Post by duaneb »

relaytheurgency wrote: post #228
richardwhiuk wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's due to the much smaller install base. As soon as you get any commercial software on linux, you break outside the package manager and start getting closer to crapware (see graphics drivers installation process which is normally 'download this shell file and execute it as root').

At that level (you're using linux, know what 'root' is, how to access root and how to execute a shell file as root) you're being lazy if something like that bites you in the ass.

> you're being lazy if something like that bites you in the ass.

I mean maybe—it's not like you have the option to analyze or debug what you're running. You can't predict everything that can go wrong, even if you know the rest of your system top to bottom.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#289

Post by nmeofthestate »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #96
ZoFreX wrote: post #34

> And no matter how technical you might be, most of the installers are so confusing that there’s no way a non-geek could figure out how to avoid the awful. Or even a geek who is in a hurry. I came very close to accidentally installing crapware when I was downloading things from Sourceforge the other day. It's no wonder regular end-users end up with all this crap.

I installed crapware on a brand new laptop a few weeks ago. I searched for "chrome" in IE, clicked the top paid link on bing.com - malware. Unbelievable. System restore worked well to fix that screw-up.

By the way, I just checked and this is STILL happening on bing.com:

Top paid result for "chrome" is the following crapware site:

http://google-chrome-uk.download-assist.com/

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#290

Post by FreezerburnV »

simias wrote: post #118
thirdsun wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-technological people are very bad at distinguishing bad sources from legitimate ones. I see it all the time - "well, the address bar said freemp3converter.com - it looked legit to me..." Now imagine a site or software that tries to look just remotely serious. Normal people often just don't see the difference. Plus, it's pretty normal in Windows world to have all kinds of crap installed - Dell, nVidia & Co. instal…

It's true, but how can you blame them? Even "reputable" sources like the official Java updater and many others attempt to install crapware. I consider myself reasonably savvy and even I get tricked to install crap on windows if I'm not 100% attentive when installing software. The other day I was setting up a brand new windows machine. I wanted to download chrome so I boot up internet explorer, end up at the bing home…

And yet, when they introduce a sandboxed store like Apple does, people throw a pitch fit :P (at least from what I remember, so pardon me if my memory is a bit fuzzy)
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