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Comment by hellbanner | Hacker News Reader

I googled for "Open Office download" on a family's computer and went with the first download -- download.com or cnet, I think.

It downloaded very fast and I thought "well, maybe it's just an initializer that torrents the rest". NOPE. Within 30 seconds of the installer, it prompted to install an ad-bar in the browser. I quickly closed and researched for the official site.

It was scary, being a technical professional, and executing adware(malware?) installer while trying to install an open-source alternative to the most popular word-processor for a less-than-savvy family member.

It was the top result on Google at the time.

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CNET.com and Download.com are both part of CBS Interactive (CNET Networks was a publicly traded company and was bought by CBS in 2008).

I worked at CBS Interactive when the Download.com installer/adware controversy erupted: http://insecure.org/news/download-com-fiasco.html

As you might expect, it was controversial inside the company as well. I guess things haven't changed after I left.

Off-topic, but: these days you should probably use LibreOffice, since most developers jumped ship to the fork and it's seen considerable improvements OpenOffice.org hasn't.

A nice benefit of using DuckDuckGo is the distinctive way it flags an official site.

I go to Wikipedia nowadays to find a project's official URL. Not foolproof but better than Google.

same thing with firefox. I made that mistake once because I never expected a malware download link to be higher in google's rankings than mozilla.org.

I was shocked, and to this day I find that utterly ridiculous.

I never download from 3rd party sites like cnet. Just take the extra few seconds to identify the official site and go there.

This is fundamentally Microsoft's fault. The shareware culture of Windows is insanely insecure these days. Any sane operating system should have a packet manager, with all the software you could want included, and nothing you don't.

With Microsoft having that large a share of the PC market this would result in anti-trust lawsuits.

I think this issue must be solved on a regulatory level, i.e. Google (and Bing!) should be punished for providing malware links (and the actual providers of course).

This is one of the reasons why I love using Chocolatey. Downloading and running an installer from an arbitrary site feels both quaint and dangerous.

Yeah it's Microsoft's fault for allowing third-party applications be be installed on their OS. You'd never see OSX or Linux letting people install software without going through a walled garden.

It isn't really a walled garden. It's just that pretty much everything is inside the garden and there is very little outside that that anyone would want.

Interestingly enough, the only commercial software that Linux people regularly install is it's own separate walled garden; Steam.

>You'd never see OSX or Linux letting people install software without going through a walled garden.

I can't speak for or against OS X, but with respect to Linux this is plainly false, unless by "Linux" you mean "Android" or by "walled garden" you mean "basic user authentication."

Pretty sure parent was being sarcastic

It's so hard to tell sometimes.

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