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Here’s What Happens When You Install the Top 10 Download.com AppsWe installed the top 10 apps from Download.com, and you’ll never believe what happened! Well… I guess maybe you might have a good guess. Awful things. Awful things are what happens. Join us for the fun!Our story ends here, but hopefully we’ve all learned some important lessons from this quick journey through the world of crapware. Freeware software vendors make almost all of their money by bundling complete nonsense and scareware that tricks users into paying to clean up their PC, despite the fact that you could prevent the need to clean up your PC by just not installing the crappy freeware to begin with.There are also no safe freeware download sites… because as you can clearly see in the screenshots in this article, it isn’t just CNET Downloads that is doing the bundling… it’s EVERYBODY. The freeware authors are bundling crapware, and then lousy download sources are bundling even more on top of it. It’s a cavalcade of crapware.Because when the product is free the real product is YOU.
Ninite is a free tool that automatically downloads, installs, and updates various Windows programs for you, skipping past the evil toolbar offers. For Windows users, Ninite is arguably the only really safe place to get freeware.Of course, safe freeware is available elsewhere online... Download sites are uniformly terrible these days — even good old SourceForge is now bundling junkware.If you want a safe place to get freeware without worrying about toolbars and other junkware, Ninite is the program to use.
It appears that Chrome warns before downloading any executable file regardless of origin. It even displays a warning when you try to download Google Chrome from Google.
So which sites are affected by the message? Sites that are known to wrap downloads in advertisement packages such as Sourceforge, Download.com, Filehippo and Softonic are but it may come as a surprise that other download sites such as Softpedia which don't wrap downloads in adware installers are also affected by this.
Why not charge a few quid and give clean downloads??!
On Virustotal I'd consider just one negative result as evidence to avoid.
Mac OS X Isn’t Safe Anymore: The Crapware / Malware Epidemic Has BegunOS X users like to make fun of Windows users as the only ones that have a malware problem. But that’s simply not true anymore, and the problem has increased dramatically in the last few months. Join us as we expose the truth about what’s really going on, and hopefully warn people about the impending doom.Since it is actually Unix under the hood, OS X has some native protection against the worst types of viruses. But the problem these days isn’t viruses that completely break your computer, it’s spyware, crapware, and adware that sneaks onto your computer, hijacks your browser, inserts ads, and tracks what you are looking at. And much of it is legal, because you get tricked into clicking the wrong thing during an installer.And now download sites, fake ads for software on search engines, and sketchy applications are bundling adware and crapware into installers for legitimate software. You can’t just assume you are safe anymore because you’re on OS X. You need to be careful what you download and what you click.Even though we’ve shown that malware, adware, crapware, and spyware is getting increasingly worse on OS X, that doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to worry or go out and install Linux or do something drastic. OS X is still not being targeted as much as Windows is, and there are still some security measures in place that make it more difficult for malware to get through.The safest thing that you can do is use the Mac App Store to install your applications whenever possible.There’s no better time for Windows users to switch to Mac. With this much crapware and adware being developed, they’ll feel right at home! (We’re joking, of course.)
What's an app?
Application software (an application) is a set of one or more programs designed to permit the user to perform a group of coordinated functions, tasks, or activities. Application software cannot run on itself but is dependent on system software to execute. Examples of an application include a word processor, a spreadsheet design and management system, an aeronautical flight simulator, a console game, a drawing, painting, and illustrating system, or a library management system.The term is used to distinguish such software from another type of computer program referred to as system software, which manages and integrates a computer's capabilities but does not directly perform tasks that benefit the user. The system software serves the application, which in turn serves the user.Examples of types of application software may include accounting software, media players, and office suites. Many application programs deal principally with documents. Applications may be bundled with the computer and its system software or published separately, and may be coded as e.g. proprietary, open-source or university projects.
"program"
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Topic: Beware what you download (Read 18412 times)
