Well, if this is the case then SourceForge committed to removing
unwanted ads. They have even setup a dedicated channel for reporting
this kind of situations. I'm including Roberto in the conversation
(Roberto, see below for context) since he already took action in a few
other cases discussed on the dev list.
Regards,
Andrea.
On 19/08/2014 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
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