Brian, that's a very likely explanation. I made the mistake many years
ago of clicking on the big green button. I can't remember now what I
got, but it installed something that caused me problems and it took a
while for me to realise what had happened. Once I did, I uninstalled the
offending software and have never toughed a big green button since.
On 19/08/2014 11:56 AM, Brian Barker wrote:
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
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
