At 08:14 19/08/2014 +0800, Carl Wilson wrote:
When you download open office it comes with an attached piece of
software called Driver Manager which is spyware, they do not claim
to be affiliated with Apache but they seem to have succeed in
attaching Driver Manager to your download.
When people make suggestions such as this, they are normally
dismissed with comments insisting that they simply must have
downloaded OpenOffice from some unofficial source and thus obtained a
contaminated product. (That hasn't happened this time so far,
though.) May I make an alternative suggestion?
When prospective users visit the official site and click on the
download link, they are redirected to sourceforge.net. They need to
wait a few second until the download begins, and even then they
probably need to recognise their browser's warning bar requesting
confirmation. They may not even know what to do with this at first.
Meanwhile, they are presented with a Sourceforge page which generally
advertises other possible free downloads. These advertisements
usually contain a large green "Download" button.
Surely it is quite likely that users will be distracted by a big
green Download button and not, initially, notice some beige banner
from their browser? They will click the big green button,
understandably thinking that this will download the product they have
come for: after all, this is still the official OpenOffice download
site, isn't it? When they install the extra software along with
OpenOffice, they will blame OpenOffice or - as here - remark that the
rogue item has somehow infected the OpenOffice download.
Note that DriverManager is indeed a program distributed by
Sourceforge: see http://sourceforge.net/projects/drivermanager/ .
There is suspiciously little information about it at the Sourceforge site.
Should there be some explanation and warning on the OpenOffice web
site immediately before the transfer to Sourceforge ("Don't touch the
button!"?) to help potential users avoid this trap? Should those
responding to complaints be aware of this likely cause of the problem
and not so quick to dismiss the user as having used ill-advised
alternative download sources?
Is this what happened to the current user?
Brian Barker
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