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Ask Toolbar Now Considered Malware By Microsoft

Posted by timothy on from the stating-the-obvious dept.

AmiMoJo writes: Last month Microsoft changed its policy on protecting search settings to include any software that attempts to hijack searches as malware. As a result, this month the Ask Toolbar, which most people will probably recognize as being unwanted crapware bundled with Java, was marked as malware and will now be removed by Microsoft's security software built in to Windows 7 and above.

8 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. bundle by sirber · · Score: 5, Funny

    will java be also removed since it's bundeled with ask toolbar?

    --
    Be or ben't
    1. Re:bundle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      This article is useless without a video of the director of Ask Software, five seconds after he heard the news.

      Good fucking riddance.

  2. Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    I feel there's a word that's appropriate... hypo... hypocr.... oh, MS Word told me the word I'm looking for is "hyper". Yep, what a bunch of hypers.

    1. Re:Hmm by amicusNYCL · · Score: 4, Funny

      The most toolbars I've counted was at least 6

      Amateur

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  3. One down... by daedalus2097 · · Score: 5, Funny

    1,753,378 to go.

  4. I always assumed that by OneSmartFellow · · Score: 4, Funny

    loading all this crap was tolerated by Microsoft because it was the main impetus for people buying new PCs.

    Now that Android is taking over the personal OS landscape, and PC sales are dropping, MS doesn't gain as much as they used to, and now actually feels the pain from allowing this to happen, they decide to remove them.

  5. That's bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Everybody I know has multiple toolbars on their internet. None of them has problems with malware. I even specifically asked the ask toolbar whether or not it was malware, and it said (and I quote) "that's ridiculous".

  6. SourceForge by Parker+Lewis · · Score: 3, Funny

    If Oracle removes Ask toolbar from Java Installer, can SourceForge provide us one version with Ask added back?