I was installing stuff onto my new machine this weekend (replacing Black, my venerable old black Dell notebook -- the new one is Grey, a shiny new Alienware beast that hopefully'll last me at least as long as Black did), and suddenly I found my Internet Explorer had a Yahoo toolbar. Since all I'd done was to check mail, that means that Yahoo ran a script on my machine to install this software against my will, and is probably doing the same to other folks's computers. I'm outraged, personally, although Yahoo probably doesn't give a crap about that, even if I do pay them money for their service.
If your browser suddenly gets a Yahoo toolbar, before they can do anything nefarious with it, go to the control panel, to "install/update/remove software" and scroll down to the bottom of the list. You can get rid of it with a click of the mouse. I can't promise it'll stay gone, though. And people wonder why Google is so successful when most of the industry is run by crooks!
3 comments:
Good lord man.. I know you talk about being a Luddite but now you're just being paranoid.
Yahoo Toolbar is NOT spyware nor does it do anything nefarious (although the most recent version of it is a bit unstable). It has a neat bookmark feature which I wish Google would copy - allowing you to have your bookmarks in a centralized store so you can get at them from any machine..
At any rate, it doesn't install itself either. Given that it uses an ActiveX control for the IE toolbar, that isn't even POSSIBLE.
No, what you have here is more than likely someone installing Yahoo Messenger and not paying attention to the default options for the rest of the Yahoo package that gets installed.. It's quite a nice package and can stop most popups and spyware as well as be quite handy in its own right.. The most recent version is a bit unstable though..
Well, I use Trillian, not YIM, so that's not how it landed. And while I'm ok with Yahoo's services in general, when you install software w/o permission on my machine, my trust drops precipitously.
I'm just saying.. You have to have (involuntarily or not) given approval somewhere.. ActiveX controls cannot install on their own.
Check your browser settings and make sure Alienware didn't ship your notebook in low-security mode.
Post a Comment