Download Wrappers and Unwanted Software are pure evil

I hope this goes viral. This is very well written and illustrated with screenshots. I recall my "non-technical relative" had a netbook with 10-inch screen and when they opened up their browser, the upper half would be toolbars stacked below each other.

IE has now tabs and address bar lined up together in one row, almost every browser has stopped showing the menu bar and what not to save the browser's real estate. I understand that privacy is the real concern here. But my screen's real estate is a concern for me. Why can't the concept of browser toolbars end?

This explains where my brother got "Conduit Search" from. I had to remove that and a bunch of other crap from his laptop.

Download.com has been going down hill for a long while. I've since stopped downloading from them.

I like how this article goes further to show how "legit" companies add this crap into their software. This crap needs to stop.

Awesome article, I really enjoyed how it went full circle at the end!. I actually have heard of the Conduit Search garbage, because some peice of software I was installing on a new machine that I trusted (and never did this) went to the dark-side and included it. Removing it was akin to removing a virus, maybe worse.

Hard to believe this post is not in the front page of HN. As the technical member of my family I'm constantly dealing with these type of issues.

What's more puzzling than the flagrant absurdity of this is why the people involved are content to waste their lives creating these things.