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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.
will java be also removed since it's bundeled with ask toolbar?
Be or ben't
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.
Anything that installs a toolbar in your browser is malware.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
1,753,378 to go.
Great, but how about marking as malware every bundled software that come with an installer? It doesn't seem complicated to me, it I install SomeProgram.exe then any other software unrelated to SomeProgram.exe should be marked as malware and removed.
Elok
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.
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.
at this pace, within a couple years I'll like Microsoft more than I like Mozilla.
Good. It is malware. I can't think of a browser toolbar that I wouldn't consider to be malware to some degree. Has anyone in the past 5 years intentionally installed one of those things? My impression is that they only ever get installed because someone wasn't paying enough attention when they installed some crappy piece of software, and it was bundled in.
The main issue *I* have with it, is that when I disable it - You know... I like to disable stuff I don't use - it refuses to stay disabled.
There are schedules, and protection tasks, and all sorts of other asshatery that will keep that process running. That's what you would normally call malware - something that refuses to stay disabled or removed.
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.
All the "negative checkoff" (click NOT to install) and all the (CNET downloads.com e.g.) sites where banner ads mislead to click on them rather than the download file button you are looking for should be treated as malware, starting a long time ago.
Gently reply
All toolbars are malware, what is the big deal. I took user install rights away, because of toolbars. They were just causing to many problems.
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".
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.
So yeah, good for Microsoft. They're doing some good things these days. Perhaps a bit like IBM when they were knocked off of their perch, MS now realise they need to actually produce good products and play nicer with customers.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
No, because the restricted behavior isn't bundling, it's changing search providers without prompting.
It's mentioned in the article in about every single sentence, so I can see how you missed it.
The task scheduler is the preferred method for launching tasks now.It's a robust unified interface with logging capabilities and error handling.
I can see the old registry entries being ignored in the future with the ability for the OS to detect and create tasks when an installer tries to write to them.
Ask finally got what it's been asking for all along
Next up - McAffee.
Then Java, then Ffflash. I can see we're gunna need a longer wall. And maybe a conveyor belt.
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.
The monthly MSRT is like the McAfee "Stinger" tool. It's a one-shot, foreground-only malware removal tool that gets replaced with an entirely new copy of the program every so often.
MSRT just runs automatically as part of Windows Update. Stinger requires you to go download it and run it manually.
Also, MSRT has undocumented API access beyond anyone else's capabilities, and a short enough support window to make it worthwhile to use undocumented API's. It wouldn't surprise me to know that MSRT does all kinds of low-level "dirty tricks" to get rid of any identified threats, given that WU virtually guarantees it to run with a reboot. The entire MSRT concept is probably the strongest position for a malware removal tool to be in. Malware would have to outright block WU to keep its foothold truly safe, and that's going to raise some alarm bells to just about everyone. And never discount the possibility of a WU dead-man's-switch. Microsoft actually has the capability to make Windows cripple itself (probably into Safe Mode) if it doesn't get malware checks of some sort on a regular basis. Why they don't just throw down and use that capability is the only remaining question. Probably because it would piss off the vocal fringe users and the anti-Microsoft hate-squad that think there's some conspiracy to spy on their porn browsing habits or some stupid thing.
I've seen people install the Google toolbar because they thought that was how to use Google... I've removed it a lot as well.
If Oracle removes Ask toolbar from Java Installer, can SourceForge provide us one version with Ask added back?
HP printer drivers are amazing, in the sense that 100+ meg of wares is installed when it only takes tens of kilobytes to actually drive a fucking printer. I mean Jesus Quincy Christ impaled on a stick with roman military nails, what in the hell?
It looks like this only applies to older versions of the Ask toolbar. According to the link in the post, "The latest version of this application is not detected by our objective criteria, and is not considered unwanted software."
I do hope that their "objective criteria" will help to keep the Ask toolbar from being quite as annoying as it was, however.