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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

#291

Post by soylentcola »

Karunamon wrote: post #262
pjc50 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple are quite happy to trash another company's OS. The Windows iTunes experience was terrible : it ate resources, was opaque in operation, didn't always sync properly and could occasionally wipe your devices. It used to be required for OS updates. The "nailing shut" is an increasing problem for anyone that believes in a free market in software. Which isn't helped by all these sites shipping value-negative software.

As an anecdote to counter another anecdote, I've never had these problems with Windows iTunes. I've used it since getting the HP branded iPod back in '02 (I think), and my music library has grown into the upper tens of thousands of songs since then. It's caused me to believe that all these people trashing on iTunes have broken computers, because the software plainly doesn't do half the crap it's accused of doing.

To continue the mostly-irrelevant story time, I've installed it a few times and generally it works OK now but it is still quite slow for what it is. My main computer is no dog either (i7, 16GB RAM, SSD, yadda yadda) and compared to other media player/managers it really is a poor performer.

I can almost understand this on the newer versions since they've made it a sort of one-stop-shop for playing media, managing iOS devices, shopping for media and software, and sorting your content databases.

But the older versions I used back when I had a "classic" iPod were just terrible and all I did with that was load music onto the iPod. I seem to remember installing some custom firmware on the iPod specifically so I could just treat it like an external drive and manage the media on it via Winamp or Mediamonkey or some other program that had no business doing a better job at handling an iPod than something straight from Apple.

Even now I just use it maybe once or twice a year to back up and update my old iPad 2. I haven't found a way to disable all of the various iTunes helper processes that want to run in the background (short of turning them off in services.msc) so it only gets updated and run when absolutely necessary.

Maybe I'm just doing something wrong and it will run better if I open it more often and let it do its thing but there's just a point where it doesn't do anything (other than iOS backups) that I can't do more easily with other software.

...but I also admit that like many things, my previous bad experiences may be causing confirmation bias and leading me to take note of iTunes issues more than I would with other software.

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

#292

Post by api »

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…

One thing we're seeing here is a clash of business cultures. Most developers and businesspeople that would hang around Hacker News are the sort of people who think business is about delivering the most value you can and getting paid for it. But globally that's really a minority point of view. Most global business focuses exclusively on the getting paid part, and tries to deliver the least possible value required to get money as quickly as possible. If you can get paid by delivering no value or even negative value, that's a big win. The ideal product is a vapid "pet rock" fad or an addictive drug like heroin or cigarettes.

The sort of software you see profiled in this article is the result of those kinds of quick-buck hustlers trying to game the software market. That's the majority of global business culture, which is why outside walled gardens with quality control it's the majority of software.

Ultimately I think this is the case because human beings are wired for scarcity and conflict. Get while the getting's good, because the next famine or raiding army is always coming. No point in building any real value in that world. It'll just get stolen or destroyed. HN is full of people who subscribe to the futurist/enlightenment notion of progress and the idea that we might be almost post-scarcity enough to entertain the decadent luxury of benevolence.

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

#293

Post by j_s »

ptaffs wrote: post #236

This timely article appears the weekend I erase & install OSX having clicked the wrong download button on CyberDuck. The Google DoubleClick banner is prominent on the page, the actual software download is "below the fold". I should know better, but I clicked the big green "Download Now" next to the big Yellow duck, and underneath the same-Green Donate button. I ended-up downloading something wrapped in Genieo's Insta…

  > Clearly this was all my own fault and poor decision making.
Don't blame the victim!

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

#294

Post by _lce0 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #286
relaytheurgency wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

well actually Ubuntu bundled spyware

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do

    Ubuntu uses the information about searches
    to show the user ads to buy various things
    from Amazon. Amazon commits many wrongs
    (see http://stallman.org/amazon.html); by
    promoting Amazon, Canonical contributes to
    them. However, the ads are not the core of
    the problem. The main issue is the spying.
    Canonical says it does not tell Amazon who
    searched for what. However, it is just as 
    bad for Canonical to collect your personal 
    information as it would have been for Amazon 
    to collect it.
More info, plus a script to fix:

https://fixubuntu.com/

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

#295

Post by thirdsun »

e40 wrote: post #207
petecooper wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Addendum: I save a ninite.com installer to their desktops, renaming it to `Run this every Wednesday`. If they see any `You need to update Flash Player` dialogues, I advise them to close them and only run the desktop icon - this in and of itself saves most people from reinfection. Edit: typo and formatting.

I cannot say enough about ninite. They are brilliant. I moved to the Mac a year ago, and I miss it dearly. I wish they had a Mac version. It's so convenient. And safe. And easy. I paid them for something just because I wanted them to be successful. Single best product I used on Windows!

Wouldn't homebrew-cask be helpful with this? It's basically homebrew for apps. Haven't tried it yet, but I always wanted to start using it with my next clean install/mac purchase.

https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask

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

#296

Post by j_s »

benbristow wrote: post #79

Unchecky is a useful defense against this. Uses about a megabyte of RAM and runs in the background, blocking most offers. http://www.unchecky.com/ Install it on all computers that I get given being the family/friends 'IT guy'.

http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ is also worth trying once, though my anec-data wasn't super-amazing.

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

#297

Post by scott_karana »

larrik wrote: post #223
benihana wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. This ruined my Apple for me for about half a decade. I refused to use any of their products because my only interaction with them was with their shitty Windows software, so I assumed all their software was shit. It wasn't until I worked with a Mac fan who let me use his 2005 MBP that I realized that they can actually make decent software. Microsoft seemed to do the exact opposite in this time period. Their Offic…

Unpopular opinion time: I've had a Mac Mini for 3 years, and I still haven't found any Apple-made desktop software I would call "decent". I've had only iPhones since the 3G came out, too, so I'm not just an anti-fanboy.

Surely you must tolerate OSX, or why would you still use the Mac Mini?

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

#298

Post by ksk »

api wrote: post #287
ksk wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

>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.

Okay, what security model do you propose then? I'm curious because I don't see a security problem here. No OS security was bypassed, there was no OS bug that was exploited. This is what happened - The user downloaded a file and installed an application.

In your previous post you mentioned terrible permission separation and application isolation - I don't see how its connected to the problem.

It seems like you want it to be so that malware applications can be installed by any user without the system suffering any consequences. You can't achieve that goal without also crippling regular applications that legitimately might want to do everything that a malware application does.

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

#299

Post by thirdsun »

josteink wrote: post #238

I see a lot of comments here about Mac & Ubuntu. I run Ubuntu myself, so no disrespect intended. That said: If we all do and make everyone else do as we say, replace Windows with Ubuntu & Mac, guess what happens next? The next shitwave of shitware will come to our favourite platforms, and they will find new exploits and new creative ways to fuck us over too. This is a social problem and technology alone wont solve it…

It's already happening on OSX. The other day a non-tech-savvy co-worker of mine wanted to install some kind of Samsung Sync software for his mobile (KIES or something?) - instead of the official site he went with the first Google result. That colorful and large download button inspired confidence after all. The downloaded app installed...something, but it wasn't Kies. It hijacked the browser, installed MacKeeper and changed all kinds of settings and preferences.

He told me after the fact and since the machine was just freshed setup with few things changed (apart from the crapware) I told him to do a clean install since you never know what you missed when you try to clean it up manually.

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

#300

Post by rmc »

hackmiester wrote: post #283
jjoonathan wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Get an off the shelf GPS watch from Garmin or TomTom. The bundled software doesn't do Linux and apt has nothing much..
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