[guycook]

Pretty much, yes - if there's a buck to be made and the law isn't being broken (in a way that will be meaningfully prosecuted), someone will do it.

To answer your first question, someone from HN should surely about this given: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20130115/y-combinator-is-fu...

Extensive commentary at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806

[makomk]

Yeah, pg even defended a YC-backed company that had built a business model around exactly this kind of bundling, saying that it wasn't a big deal because their installers always asked for permission before installing the bundled crap. (Which they did in exactly the same way as these download.com installers - by making the prompts look like EULA acceptance screens.)

[username223]

pg "investigated" that crapware company a couple of years ago [1], but they still apparently exist, and continue to collect MAC addresses.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062133

[unreal37]

What was the result of that investigation? Can't find any info in the original thread.

[username223]

I don't know, but I'm guessing that the comment solved the PR problem, so there was no need to do any investigation, or to act on the results of one.

EDIT: pg's response was basically "suck it": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711