Hacker News Reader

One of the happiest days of my life was when a Symantec support person, very courteously, helped me remove every Symantec product from my computer.

View on HN

i remember needing a util for this:

https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/v...

was a key component of my debloating efforts back in the XP days.

Norton protect quietly reinstalled itself after I ran that tool.

Oracle snuck it onto my system in a java update and I ended up having to dig through the registry and disk to weed it out. It is malware, plain and simple.

What could the lifetime value of a Norton customer be that they went to such incredible lengths to aquire?

Quite a lot, and it’s not just Norton. Google does the same, and pays companies to secretly include Chrome in their installers and auto-updaters, like they included the Google Toolbars before.

Here’s an interview with the VLC developers, where the VLC developers complain how Google tried to get them to secretly install Chrome with it, and offered enormous amounts of money, but they obviously said no: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWx1P93nS0c&t=48s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com