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.

Comments

bundle

[sirber]

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

Re:bundle

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Good fucking riddance.

Re:bundle

[robmv]

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

Flashback time

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Re:Flashback time

[OzPeter]

Are you serious? How can you survive in today's World Wide Web environment without a tailored toolbar experience that sends all your input and browsing data to its publisher? Ask and you shall receive.

Funny, I thought that was Google's business model.

One down...

[daedalus2097]

1,753,378 to go.

Ahhh... Toolbars!

[neilo_1701D]

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.

It's hard to imagine, but

[bluegutang]

at this pace, within a couple years I'll like Microsoft more than I like Mozilla.

Good

[nine-times]

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.

Re:Office upload center

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hmm

[gfxguy]

I experience that with my wife. She's got a reasonably nice desktop for doing what she does (nothing important) but complains it runs slow. It was screaming fast once upon a time, so I go and run and rerun all the anti-virus software and malware removers, remove have the extensions that have installed themselves, reboot a few times in the process, and it's screaming fast again. The most toolbars I've counted was at least 6, and the search is almost always stuck on something undesirable.