World's Most Annoying IE Toolbar

nautical9 writes "Following the same devious footsteps of the infamous Bonzi Buddy, Gator, and Comet Cursor "enhancements", Xupiter now has their own self-installing toolbar for IE. There are many claims that if you leave your security preferences at their default level, it will install itself without your express permission. And once on your system, it's gracious enough to reset your homepage to xupiter.com, forward all your searches to their search engine, download and automatically launch applications (like gambling applets), and blocks all attempts to set these back to normal. Removing it isn't trivial either - it automatically checks for updates upon reboot, where it constantly changes the registry settings it uses, making the jobs of spyware removal programs like AdAware or Spybot Search & Destroy much harder. No word yet if it collects and forwards personal data."

My searches

[govtcheez]

to their credit, Xupiter's search engine returns the best quality squirrel porn I've ever seen.

THANKS

[ematic]

Thanks a lot. I clicked on the link, and now I have this stupid toolbar installed!

Kudos to marketing scheme

[lyoz]

ya.. now u have done it.. now every /.er will click on the link and get it installed ...

ahh... so u dont need to read the actual article to comment... damn it #*#@

Help!

[LucidityZero]

Help, help! My Bonzi Buddy is eating my Gator, and my Comet Cursor is header for a direct impact with Xupiter!!!

Re:Sick the Lawyers on Them

[stratjakt]

We need laws for everything!

Every time I wiggle my mouse around or push my spacebar I need a law to clearly define what I'm doing, what my rights and responsibilities are, and what the punishments are if I wiggle that mouse a little bit too far to the left!

Laws, laws, more laws! We dont have enough laws!

People are too stupid to live lives themselves or take any sort of personal responsibility! We need laws and lawyers and lawsuits!

More LAWS! Laws are the answer.

I'm writing my congressman right now, demanding more and increasingly complicated laws!

IE

[davie]

Internet Explorer

Box of chocolates

funny

[Boromir son of Faram]

I guess I still don't see what the big deal is. It's just like the email "virii" that require people to execute scripts. If you don't want the stupid toolbar, don't download and install it. If you do install it and then you change your mind, uninstall it. This is isn't rocket surgery, people.

I'm also pretty surprised to see this kind of sympathy for Windows newbs on this site. We're all well beyond computer literate, and we recognize that computers and software are just tools that do what we want. If the lusers can't take the time to learn how to use their computers properly, well, that's their own fault.

The toolbar must not fall into the hands of one who would use it to destroy us. It is folly, then, to take it to him, when we could use it ourselves for such greatness.

Man alive!

[stubblehead]

These types of apps piss me off so much! What's it gonna take for Congress to get some legislation in order...

***//MESSAGE TERMINATED//INSERTING REPLACEMENT//***

XUPITER IS GREAT! EVERYONE NEEDS XUPITER! IT CAN TYPE FOR YOU! WHY DON'T YOU INSTALL XUPITER [xupiter.com] NOW?
Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter Xupiter

What? No Mac version??

[christurkel]

But...but...I want my browser taken over too! We Mac users never any get any of the cool stuff Windows does...::snifff::

This just in

[Bob Abooey]

There is also no word in yet if it will cause cancer or format your hard drive...

There is also no word in yet if it will blast your brain with secret radio waves that will make you submit to secret commands from the government but it's a good idea to always wear your tin-foil hat anyways.

Sheesh...

Re:Thank God for Mozilla

[DeadSea]

Just this morning, I ran into the first site that I have seen that gets around Mozilla's popup blocking. It puts up a popup window whenever you click on any of the links. Mozilla allows this. Soon more sites will be doing this. I wish nobody else used Mozilla.

Re:THANKS

[mbyte]

you must be new to slashdot. you should not click every link thats here (didn't you learn form goatse.cx ? ;)

Funnier

[Angram]

"rocket surgery"

Hah, now that's even funnier.

terrorists!

[QEDog]

this things behaves so much like a virus, that i'm sure they have to support evil terrorist with it...

(maybe with claims like that we can convince the goverment to go start witch hunts that will go after all the irritating things like that one)

Which of these words doesn't belong.

[MongooseCN]

Lets play a game, which of these words doesn't belong in this list:

Spyware
Popups
Adware
Mozilla

Re:Ouch..

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my girlfriends computer has this toolbar

Just one question: Should the missing ' be before or after the "s" in "girlfriends" ? :-)

You asked for it!

[Cpt_Kirks]

That's what you get for running IE.

REAL MEN parse the raw html in their heads and just imagine what the pictures are from the tags.

Wimp.

Thank God for IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately, there aren't many people like you (Mozilla users)...there are far more hordes of stupid IE users. These suffer through popups and popunders and spyware so that money can be infused into the Internet to subsidize my fast, ad-free experience. Well, and yours.

Here's to IE!

To always trust content from 'x' Click Here O

[teamhasnoi]

Why isn't there a 'Never trust content' checkbox? And a tab in options to review who you are and are not trusting? (Like cookies.)

I have never checked 'always trust' and have wished for a 'Never trust, key their car, and don't ask me again' checkbox for a long, long time.

Especially after the "Microsoft is no longer a 'Trusted' party fiasco of last year.

If you can't trust Bill, who can you trust?

Thanks for listening, Bonzi Buddy. You're my only friend.

Re:no it won't

[toddmori]

I went through the same thing with Xupiter. I also learned the hard way to make sure ALL Xupiter related processes need to be killed, or the damn thing self-heals everything from reg keys through executables...OTOH, maybe Microsoft should try to learn something from this. It is pretty sad that a piece of spyware crap like this is more resilient than the OS it runs under

Re:If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a bad analogy for software, innit?

Re:You asked for it!

[aengblom]

REAL MEN parse the raw html in their heads and just imagine what the pictures are from the tags.

Oh GOD, now it's installed there too!

Be careful...

[rigmort]

Do not taunt Happy Fun BarTM

Re:My searches

[rmadmin]

Well hot damn! Thats reason enough for me to stop using mozilla and switch right back over to IE5!

Uninstalling Xupiter

[Jenova]

Surfing to http://www.xupiter.com/uninstall/
and this appeared on my browser

-------------
Xupiter Toolbar Uninstallation process was started.
Please, close this window.
-------------

Sound like those guys are pretty annoyed somehow.

Already given up

[mao che minh]

My Windows partition is just a big heap of junk, I gave up on it a long time ago. I got me this purple bear that likes to hop at out me when I open the control panel. I got women that skate around on the title bars until I crash. There is some winsys32 process that sends my ICQ password (like I care) to a hotmail account everyday. My Internet Explorer is now more of a "Yahoo!" explorer. I even have these helpful little pop-ups that inform me of terrific new offers in internet gambling and travel - every 30 seconds.

Actually, now that I think about it, my Redhat desktop is kind of boring.....

Re:no it won't

[CmdrWass]

The Tooth Fairy is known for leaving money in exchange for children's teeth... doesn't make her real.

girlfriends?

[merz]

One of my girlfriends computer has this toolbar, and it is a real pain working on that computer.

Wait you're a slashdot user who has managed to get not one, but multiple girlfriends? You should publish a book - the geek world needs to hear your story!

Re:no it won't

[ceejayoz]

And hope he doesn't like the latest games...

Re:no it won't

[Psmylie]

"The Tooth Fairy is known for leaving money in exchange for children's teeth... doesn't make her real.
What?! She's not real? Dammit!

So much for my retirement teeth.

Let me summarize those terms:

[fireboy1919]

We 0wn your system. We will do whatever we want to it that will make us money.

Occasionally there will be software that stops our software. Our servers will report this back to us, and we will update our vir^h^h^hsoftware to shut this off. Software known to conflict with ours include Norton Antivirus, Symantec Antivirus, and several firewall utilities.

If we can find any information that is incriminating about you, we will sell it back to you for a price that we decide is right. Or maybe we we'll just keep the info and charge you a monthly fee not to tell anybody.

We may use your computer to propagate our software to other users by e-mailing everyone on your address book, and any IP addresses that you contact. We may also delete some of your programs to make more space for ours.

Finally, if we decide to, we will use your computer to participate in a DDOS attack of anyone we want. Thank you for using Xupiter. We hope you enjoy using our software as much as we do.

My Gulible parents...

[s-orbital]

They have every piece of annoying software installed on there 500Mhz computer. From Yahoo Toolbar, to some WeatherBug thing, to Gator, CometCursor...
As a Linux guy, and techie in general, it makes me sick whenever I wonder how much spyware is on that box. Of course they think these things are useful!

Before I installed W2K, the time it took for Windows 98 to boot was astronomical. P.O.S.O.S.

Re:no it won't

[jaavaaguru]

The Tooth Fairy is known for leaving money in exchange...

Viruses are known for leaving megabytes of junk in Exchange.

Re:Automatic downloads

[Blimey85]

Check the %WINDIR%/.jpi_cache/ directory structure.)

Damn it! Why can't Mandrake put things in the normal places? I've looked all over my hard drive and I can't find %WINDIR% anywhere... guess I should have went with RedHat.

Re:Wrong

[lessthan0]

"isn't that the digital equivalent of mugging and rape?"

Well, if someone was walking around the Internet, flaunting their IE all over the place, with their security settings half way down to their waist, then weren't they asking for it?

Come on, you know they wanted Xupiter. They wanted it!

Bring on Palladium to save us!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, one more reason why DRM and Palladium will help stop nonsense like this. By giving Microsoft the authority on what can and cannot be installed on our systems, it makes it so much safer.

I'm not being sarcastic, but Microsoft was smart by introducing these technologies.

Re:A few questions answered:

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

My favorite is how ads are "enhancements":
To further enhance your media viewing experience, Xupiter reserves the right to run advertisements and promotions

To further enhance your sensory experience, Xtupider reserves the right to beat you upside the head with a large multi-colored baseball bat.

Re:no it won't

[DrPepper]

It may or may not prompt you depending on your settings, and as others have suggested, bugs in the browser.

However, in my experience there are a large number of people who will just click "OK" on anything presented to them. Take the recent FriendlyGreetings [sophos.com] incident. It preys on people who don't read what is in front of them, or even wonder what they are being asked to do!

Give all you money to CmdrTaco? [ YES ] [ no ]

Re:Going after Xupiter

[Oswald]

Lawyers? You really think that's necessary? I'll bet a politely-worded email to that nice Mr. Jeff Phucksum would be all it took to end this whole misunderstanding.

Best fake identity ever!

[sbszine]

Domain Name: AMATEURPORNHOUSE.COM

Administrative Contact:
Phucksum, Jeff

I bet he has a moustache on his driver's licence photo.

Where do I get this toolbar?

[rice_burners_suck]

Where do I get this toolbar?

My systems are set up as minimally as possible for efficiency and reliability. For the life of me, I can't figure out how people manage to screw up their computers as badly as they often do.

I have many friends who have enormous hard drives and have filled them to the brim with all kinds of programs and downloads. Their computers, which are some of the fastest around in terms of hardware resources, run more slowly than an old 286 would if it was running Windows XP through a Pentium IV emulator written in Microsoft GW-BASIC, where the emulator's "RAM" and its processor registers reside on a slow tape drive, with each register on opposite ends of the tape. Oh, and did I mention all the graphics, sounds, windows, and other garbage that shows up all the time as they're running their computer? Just so you understand, all they ever do is write emails and write text in a word processor. But their computers are filled to the brim with crap.

I think the xupiter toolbar would be an innovative addition to my friends' highly optimized configuration.

Sincerely,


The Negra Modelo Troll

P.S., I drink Guinness too. I know I've talked smack on its flavor in the past but you have to find a bartender who knows how to pour and serve it. I can't stand the stuff out of bottles.