Spamware downloads

[WallShadow]

Good evening everyone,

I 'm wondering about the pieces of crap that are often advertised on various file hosting sites with signs on them such as "DOWNLOAD NOW!" which redirect you to who knows where and gives you a clear download link. Many technologically challenged people may accidentally download and run the, installing various shit on their system which wastes their memory and does no good. The other day, I was re-installing firefox manually, and googled "Mozilla Firefox download". Blindly, I click on the first result and ran it, thinking it was the actually deal from the Mozilla corporation. It took me all the way to the installer until I realized that it wasn't the real Firefox installer because it politely asked whether i want to install more shitty spamware on my computer.

Seriously guys, is this even fucking legal? Anyone ever have experiences with it?

Now I'm sweeping through my whole fucking computer picking up the remains of the piece of shit ToDownload manager. FML

-WallShadow <3

[LoGiCaL__]

Yeah, it's a shitty situation. More than likely either new or from another country(the site). Learn to alt + f4 if you've gone to far and can't get out of a pop up box. Plus, and i mean no disrespect with this....but if you were re-downloading firefox why did you google and just not go to http://www.firefox.com?

As for getting rid of everything already installed, can you roll back to a time before that or is it preventing you from doing it? Also, just out of curiosity....what was the initial reason you had to re-install the browser?

Patience is a virtue. Think twice before you click or check source code or right click on a link and copy link location and re-past and see if that's the same address you expect to be sent to.

[WallShadow]

why did you google and just not go to http://www.firefox.com?

Because you never know whether <insert company name here>.com will always redirect to the company's site or to a site of a mimic program. I figured googling it will be simpler. Maybe a bad habit of mine, depends on the way you look at it.

can you roll back to a time before that or is it preventing you from doing it?

I personally don't like rolling back unless my computer is completely totaled. In fact, my computer is approaching an age of ~4 and kind of running out of space, I'm thinking of just wiping the drive clean and starting over.

what was the initial reason you had to re-install the browser?

I got a weird YouTube bug which gave me a black screen for every video and with right click, it simply told me 'movie not loaded...' . A bit of googling forced me to reinstall FF, Java, and Adobe Flash Player. It fixed nothing. The temporary solution I found is that under the https protocol, the videos worked completely fine. After about an hour, it started to work again. Just strange...

Patience is a virtue.

I agree. And because I gave the damn thing administrator privileges, I can only sit and wait until the hostile takeover begins >.>

thanks!

-WallShadow <3

[LoGiCaL__]

Well, if your about to whipe the drive, I don't see the harm in trying to roll back to a point before this happened. At the very least you get a redo.