My terms are net thirty
Noticed, the other day, during a routine check of running processes somebody new and uninvited. Seems the ubiquitous and annoying 'MySearch' toolbar had, at some point in the past, installed itself on one of my Windows boxes.
Spent a bit of time yanking it out, marvelling at the pushiness of the thing. No fewer than three dialogues in the uninstall insisting that this is really a quite lovely piece of software, so are you sure you want to get rid of it? really sure? really, really sure?
Yeah, I'm sure you stupid buggers. Yanked it out, went hunting down all the registry keys and executables, made sure it was really gone. Apparently this is a 'ware that's not always real good about honestly going away when you tell it to do so.
Also in the pushiness category: it's a bit incredible that it even got installed in the first place. If it slimed its way in through some dumb Explorer scripting thing, this speaks volumes about how ubiquitous this stuff is, since I almost never use Explorer for exactly those sorts of reasons, and it couldn't have had a lot of opportunities. It's also possible, I guess, it got installed at some point when I installed some shareware. Which was careless, but I was trying out a few odd widgets for an odd project about a week ago, tried four or five of them trying to avoid writing a few things myself (which, in the end, I wound up doing anyway), and foolishly didn't watch what the installs were doing to my system as closely as I should have.
Found myself thinking as I went through this that I should bill these clowns. Didn't take real long, but at my consulting rates, it's still an invoice worth writing. Hey, assholes: no, I don't want your software, even if it is (as the malware sites seem to feel) mostly pretty harmless. I do crypto work and security work, can't just have stupid shit like this running on my boxes just 'cos some marketing genius thinks installing software without really asking folks about it is a good idea. So here's your invoice for my time. My terms are net thirty. Have a nice day.
Spent a bit of time yanking it out, marvelling at the pushiness of the thing. No fewer than three dialogues in the uninstall insisting that this is really a quite lovely piece of software, so are you sure you want to get rid of it? really sure? really, really sure?
Yeah, I'm sure you stupid buggers. Yanked it out, went hunting down all the registry keys and executables, made sure it was really gone. Apparently this is a 'ware that's not always real good about honestly going away when you tell it to do so.
Also in the pushiness category: it's a bit incredible that it even got installed in the first place. If it slimed its way in through some dumb Explorer scripting thing, this speaks volumes about how ubiquitous this stuff is, since I almost never use Explorer for exactly those sorts of reasons, and it couldn't have had a lot of opportunities. It's also possible, I guess, it got installed at some point when I installed some shareware. Which was careless, but I was trying out a few odd widgets for an odd project about a week ago, tried four or five of them trying to avoid writing a few things myself (which, in the end, I wound up doing anyway), and foolishly didn't watch what the installs were doing to my system as closely as I should have.
Found myself thinking as I went through this that I should bill these clowns. Didn't take real long, but at my consulting rates, it's still an invoice worth writing. Hey, assholes: no, I don't want your software, even if it is (as the malware sites seem to feel) mostly pretty harmless. I do crypto work and security work, can't just have stupid shit like this running on my boxes just 'cos some marketing genius thinks installing software without really asking folks about it is a good idea. So here's your invoice for my time. My terms are net thirty. Have a nice day.
posted by AJM at 9:53 a.m. (Permanent Link)
