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Ask Toolbar Now Considered Malware By Microsoft
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.
When people called me, having trouble with their browsers, and there were about 15 or more toolbars taking up their entire screen. And ask was always there, sometime multiple times. Anything that installs a toolbar in your browser is malware.
Ditto. That's usually one of the first questions I ask, and most people have no idea how it even got on their machine. I tell them "they aren't giving you this toolbar to be nice, they're giving it to you so they can control your searches and sell you stuff."
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I always remember this image of IE7 stuffed with toolbars. A similar test was done on Windows XP.
In the case of IE7, this was done as a test to see if the reset function would work correctly. It did.
For me, it came with both Skype and DirectX. Few other things I can't remember before that. A quick Google search reveals that it comes with a lot of things.
The Bing toolbar doesn't change search settings without prompting, and is not removed. Same with the Google toolbar.
Getting there. Microsoft released a no-install version of Java bundled with Minecraft recently, so you can still play Minecraft without actually needing to hook Java into everything.
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That is something Minecraft developers could have done years ago. The binary license of the JRE allows it to be bundled with an application for private use of that application.
When redistributing the JRE on Microsoft Windows as a private application runtime (not accessible by other applications) with a custom launcher, the following files are also optional. These are libraries and executables that are used for Java support in Internet Explorer and Mozilla family browsers; these files are not needed in a private JRE redistribution.
from the Java 8 README
He's not talking about Microsoft's antivirus/antimalware, he's talking about the 'malicious software removal' that's part of Windows Update even if you don't have MS's AV installed.
It removes a very few specific things that can be difficult to get rid of.
Annoying Oracle can't be a bad thing. I can't believe they bundle it when Java is needed for so many enterprise apps - surely the reputational damage is worth more than the revenue from bundling the toolbar? It makes them look cheap and certainly not enterprise.
If you download the "server" JRE (actually it's a full JDK, I don't know why they label it that way), it comes as a simple tarball. It doesn't interact with the registry, doesn't install the browser plugin -- it's just full JDK distribution. I'm guessing they are locked into a multi-year co-marketing deal with Ask for the consumer distribution. I always just download the server version, unzip, and add C:\jdk1.x.y_z to my PATH and I'm done.
If you just run a silent install of the offline installer it doesn't install ASK either. Granted getting to the offline installer is not exactly obviously presented on their download page, but it is available. And corporations have been using that for years.