July 2nd, 2008

Yesterday I booted my unreliable little laptop computer to discover a message by Adobe telling me the following:

  1. There is an update "available"
  2. When would I like to install it? Now? In a moment? How about right away?

There was no opportunity to not install it (as far as I could see) so I gave the official seal of approval and it went off and did its thing quickly and silently.

But it really bothered me that Adobe installs boot-time crud onto my computer when I install their reader (or any other product for all I know). I didn't read that single line buried near the end of the 10,000 word EULA that said I was agreeing to this, and though they think they may have covered their asses in some literalist 4-year-old mentality way (most legal manoeuvrings, though complicated in language, are infantile in motivation) it still biffs my bagels.

I changed the settings so that Adobe PDF would not keep running little boot-time programs. (I won't tolerate Java doing that, and Java is a lot more legitimate than anything Adobe conjures up.) But I have a vague suspicion that I already changed those settings, and somehow they were changed back—not manually by me, you can be sure! I'll have to keep my eyes on that.

But, come to think of it, Adobe is a bit player in this market. Consider how, the other day I installed iTunes (I wanted to see my own band's MP3s for sale on iTunes—how cool is that?) but in order to see it I had to install the software. Fine, in went iTunes.

But once the initial update began, along for the ride came QuickTime! Good Christ, they installed a completely different piece of software with the iTunes updater! And this from the company that had the gross dishonesty to create that 1984 commercial for the Super Bowl a few years back. Hah, if you ask me, Apple is showing more Big Brother tendencies lately than Microsoft. You need their player in order to have iTunes!

When QuickTime installs, the first thing it does is try to take over all player associations that other media players have. Yes, this hijacks Microsoft's own player (which must be their ultimate goal) but it also hijacks other players that users (such as myself) have installed in place of Windows Media Player. Who do they think they are? What right do they think they have to my computer's file associations? Exactly who is software's Evil Empire here?

And then comes QTTask, a little memory-resident virus-like program that keeps being added to the list of boot-time programs every time you run their player. You can remove reference to it from the registry, and you can use MSConfig to stop it from getting loaded, but the next time you run QuickTime (or, I presume, iTunes) it comes back into the boot list. Who told them this kind of behaviour was okay?

(For the record: To stop this viral behaviour, delete or rename the program QTTask.exe from your C:\Program Files\QuickTime folder. I renamed mine, and it stopped getting loaded.)

Next thing you know, they're going to start telling us what books to read and what thoughts to have. Looking at this behaviour, I would have to say that Apple talks a good game, but it's the worst offender. Shame on them!

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