What these calculations don’t take into account is the long-term image of the site. I am sure you are right about their financial calculation. Whatever short term gain in revenue they may have will not be worth the permanent loss in reputation. I am very disappointed and strongly encourage them to revisit this terrible decision. In these cases, users are twice given the chance to ‘miss’ the checkbox to not install whatever the bundle of the month is. Even the vendors that bundle their own toolbars don’t want a wrapper with its own bundles that precedes theirs. Other vendors will feel the same, trust me. I no longer can direct users to until they change this policy. CNET used to have a policy against listing programs with bundles. Other download sites do this, and I’ve always considered them ‘rogue’. Despite what they may say about more statistics, there is only one reason they added it - to throw in bundles (BING Toolbar right now). To say I was unhappy to discover that they had made this change is an understatement.

I was using them as a mirror, as they kept the product up to date and were reliable. Since Bitsum Techologies is staunchly ANTI-BUNDLE, I was *shocked* when I saw that CNET had made this change. I got the ASK toolbar again and it requires a special anti-malware software tool to get rid of it. Your new junk (and infected machine) comes to you from CNET, without any choices. Given that this is software that is being advertised by CNET during the DOWNLOAD PROCESS – right there in the window of their own special download tool (and you can’t get anything from them without that tool) this means there is no chance at all that it is coincidental – that the stuff you get installed with no “opt out”, came to you inside of the software companies install file. This incarnation of the CNET downloader goes on to download and install software on your PC without a direct warning (except for what appear to users to be “banners ads”) and with no “OPT OUT” choices. I got 4 pieces of extra software, only one had an “opt out”, and the ones I had no choice about getting contained two virus programs. What you do not know is that they intend on putting that software on your machine without asking you. FAR worse than that – the CNET download tool now also (it seems so innocent when you see it happening) sending (what look like) advertisements during the file transfer as you wait for your file.

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