[boudin]

I always used to think ask jeeves was a malware because of the IE bar that was installed automatically with some app (java i think).

A fair amount of my teenage years was spent on uninstalling IE search bars (and other crap) from the computers of friends of my parents and ask jeeves was a massive pain to remove (had to remove dlls and registry entries manually as the uninstaller wasn't doing anything).

Because of that i wonder if most people outside of english speaking countries ignored there was a legit service behind this malware. I, for sure, never used it and always told people to not touch it based on how dodgy this search bar was.

So, because the time i wasted because of you and the number of computers you messed up by showing up uninvited, i say good ridance jeeves, i never liked you

[SoftTalker]

Even Oracle on windows would install an Ask toolbar in IE if you didn't untick the pre-selected checkbox in the installer. I always thought that was weird, for software that expensive to be including an IE toolbar for what, a few pennies more of revenue?

[Centigonal]

it's Oracle.

[tw600040]

and windows..

[Clamchop]

I remember most installers bundling such bullshit. It may have been so normalized that no one was sincerely asking if participating would harm their reputation.

I barely noticed as the practice went out of fashion but I'm so glad it did.

[apexalpha]

Dutch here... Most of my family kept having the Yahoo search bar in there for some reason.

Then it become Google, then something else that popped up.

The amount of time I've spent in my life fixing stuff on Microsoft "All binaries have full disk access by default" Windows is weird. It also mostly faded when people moved to locked-down smartphones.

I wonder if young people today could even comprehend what a dangerous shitshow Windows was pre 7.

[SoftTalker]

Any Windows release that was based on NT had the notion of users and administrators. It was just that in the default setup, the user account was also an administrator.

[apexalpha]

Since Vista they added a prompt, the UAC. But since they required it for almost anything people trained themselves to just hit Yes on everything.