Yahoo Messagenger – JUST DON’T!

Unless you are sure you want your system infested with useless bloat for ever more don’t install Yahoo Messenger! I did yesterday and now I’m really regretting it. For a start it wedges itself in everywhere. It runs a process to harass you into setting yahoo as your home page and as your default search. It wedges it’s tool bars into all your browsers and generally just puts itself everywhere it can. As a Mac user I’m not used to this kind of carry-on so it annoys me. However, my annoyance has only just begun. I had to install it to test something in work. My tests being over I went to un-install it today. I went to control panel->add remove programs and found it. Clicked uninstall. It warned me it would need a reboot to complete the uninstall and asked me if I was OK with that. I gave my consent and on it went. It took disturbingly little time and then my machine rebooted. Three guesses what started up on reboot all by itself without my ever asking it to. You got it, Yahoo Messenger! To make things worse, it is now gone from the control panel, and there is no uninstaller for it in it’s start menu folder. The uninstaller un-installed itself but not the program. Windows users need to stand up to this kind of rubbish software and stop using it. TBH I think this behavior would be classed as spy-ware and is probably illegal in the US. I hope someone takes these muppets to court. Enough is enough!

[tags]Yahoo Messenger, Spy-ware[/tags]

Update: It gets even worse! Fresh off the presses of US-CERT we have news of a publicly available exploit for the buggering thing. Just what I need, some randomers executing arbitrary code on my machine via an app I can’t un-install!