My story on Cnet’s Download.com installer that the company added to many downloads on their website has sparked the interest of other websites and software developers. Users who download software from download.com now download an installer first that comes bundled with a toolbar. This web installer then offers to download and install the installer of [...]

Categories: Security, The Web

I have to admit that I’m not downloading many files from Cnet’s download.com software portal. I usually prefer direct downloads from developer sites. Sometimes however developers link to the downloads on download.com instead of offering the downloads on their sites. This can make sense from a business perspective, but removes some of the controls they [...]

Categories: Spyware, The Web

Cnet’s Seth Rosenblatt today published a story about privacy risks in private browsing modes of modern web browsers. He summarized the findings of a soon-to-be published report of researchers at Stanford University’s Computer Science Security Lab. The researchers analyzed the private browsing modes of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari. First [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera

Several so called software updates were developed in the last few years. Many of the popular applications of this kind are backed up by a large download portal on the Internet. Cnet’s Techtracker falls into that category. The software program is available for the Windows operating system and requires a Cnet account before it can [...]

Categories: Software, Windows