Peeve of The Day: Applications Installing Stuff on My Computer Without Letting Me Know!
I like most other techies are one of those that always clicks the Advanced Button when setting up software. The reason I do that most of all is I want to control exactly what goes onto my machine. The problem though is a lot of software these days are doing away with their Advance Buttons. Case in point iTunes. Now here's where you get to see me rant.
Firstly, it seems to be there is no way you can download iTunes on its own. You have to download QuickTime with it which if you look at recent trends is a walking (or should I say talking ;)) time-bomb and in my humble opinion not that great an application in the first place. Perhaps most importantly it is an application I don't use. And talk about bundling – I bet something like this would have got a lot more bad press if it came out of Redmond!
Secondly and this is where it gets really annoying, I am not sure what business iTunes has installing an Outlook addin. For crying out loud it is an media player. Also if I really wanted to for some reason wanted to integrate my music player with my email client – gee I don't know maybe I wanted to let everyone I send an email know what music I was listening to currently – I would like to choose to install the addin explicitly. Don't be going installing stuff on my machine without letting me know. Now I know that somewhere in that EULA they make me click through it probably says they can sell me and my computer to the lowest bidder but still isn't this what gets some pieces of software classified as spyware?
One other thing – if you are going to be starting services or background processes on me, stuff that will auto start with each logon let me know too. Sometimes I know these things are obvious but again with my media players really I am not expecting this – but maybe I am just overly paranoid!
Anyways my standard operating procedure after updating iTunes, is to kill all traces of QuickTime and then go into Outlook and delete the iTunes addin. Doesn't seem to have any impact on either Outlook, my machine in general or iTunes specifically. The moral of this story from a security perspective - just like with the Adobe XSS issue – don't do stuff that unnecessarily increases your attack surface. It means you will be targeted more and you will be compromised eventually!