

- GENA PHOTOSTAMPER INSTALL
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- GENA PHOTOSTAMPER MAC
They will stop inserting their adware into a particular download when people yell loudly enough, but they evidently aren’t learning any lessons from the repeated criticism. However, CNET has shown a history, over several years, of repeatedly doing this kind of thing. Actually, boycott may be too light a word, since that usually implies a temporary action, taken until the behavior of the company being boycotted changes. I would strongly advise boycotting not only, but all CNET sites. However, this is the first time that I have actually located a sample – and, not just one but two! This suggests to me that CNET may be ramping up their efforts to earn dirty money using someone else’s software, just as Softonic has done recently.
GENA PHOTOSTAMPER MAC
I have been hearing about these issues with for a couple years now, and had been told that Mac apps had been affected. Derek Currie has also documented the same behavior with a copy of A Better Finder Rename. None of them are included in the official XLD download.Īfter making this discovery, a little searching turned up the fact that I’m not the only one who has noticed, and XLD is not the only app being used for these nefarious purposes. A legitimate download site would have simply provided a link to that disk image, or a mirrored (and unmodified) copy.Īt this point, I opened Safari, and discovered that it had no less than four new extensions installed!Īll four of these extensions – Searchme, the Amazon and Ebay shopping extensions, and Slick Savings – were installed by the CNET installer. This, of course, could have been achieved in one simple step, without the nonsense of the junk-filled installer, by simply downloading the disk image straight from the XLD website.
GENA PHOTOSTAMPER INSTALL
If you read those terms, you will notice that they ask you to agree to the install of a number of different undesirable programs, as well as changing of your search engine and home page.Īfter finishing with the installation, all that happens is that the XLD disk image is downloaded and opened. The next screen, though, should raise some serious red flags… assuming that you don’t do what most people do and simply click past the terms and conditions without reading them. The window that opened would have alleviated my concerns slightly, if I didn’t know better, since it did mention the app that I had gone looking for: However, since it was a test system and I didn’t really have anything to fear, I opened it. Right away, this is something that I wouldn’t normally touch with a ten-foot pole. Opening the disk image shows nothing but an app named CNET-Installer.

If you download the app from, however, you will end up with a cryptically-named disk image file that does not seem to have any relation to the program in question. The program that brought this issue to my attention is called X Lossless Decoder (aka XLD), an open-source app for dealing with a number of lossless audio file formats. Upon downloading that file and opening it in a test system, I found that it behaved exactly as I suspected. This was first brought to my attention by a post on the Apple Support Communities, in which it was discovered that a number of new browser extensions were added following the install of a program that had been downloaded from. Unfortunately, I have just found hard evidence that these practices are continuing, almost 2 years later, with Mac downloads. This in particular angered Fyodor, the developer of the open source network mapping tool Nmap, so severely that he sent a strongly-worded e-mail to a security mailing list, leading to CNET being widely reviled by the developer community.
GENA PHOTOSTAMPER SOFTWARE
In particular, they have been known to insert their own adware in downloaded installers, contrary to the wishes (and without the knowledge) of the developers whose software is being hijacked. October 29th, 2013 at 8:41 AM EDT, modifiedĭ has been accused of unethical behavior in the past.
