WARNING: JUNK AHEAD
Jane Hoskyn puts the boot into tech villains, jargon-spouting companies and software stuffed with junk
Junk offender: Xara Web Designer Premium
Xara Web Designer Premium is the undisputed leader of the WYSIWYG web-design gang (that’s ‘what you see is what you get’). It’s got all the tools to create sophisticated websites without needing to know HTML. Its £69.99 price tag is fair – and you can try it out for free.
So Xara was top of my shortlist for the section on great paid-for trials in our Cover Feature (see page 50) and remains our top web design Buy It! recommendation (see page 33), but it also reminds us that paidfor software can be junk offenders too.
Premium PUP
You’d have thought a program costing 70 quid wouldn’t need to bundle adware in its installer. But here it is: ‘simpliclean’, pre-ticked and ready to infect your hard drive with one click of the Next button (see screenshot).
‘What advantages does simpliclean offer me?’ asks Xara’s installer. ‘Safely delete junk data’ and ‘Save Energy’ it replies. I checked Google for a second opinion, and found several. “I can’t figure out how to delete simpliclean… I’ve installed this program accidentally,” laments a visitor to UGetFix ( www.snipca.com/24088). “It won’t uninstall from my PC no matter how many times I have tried,” complains a reader of Program Uninstall Guides ( www.snipca.com/24089). Simpliclean may not be malware, but by appearing on PCS unexpectedly and refusing to budge without a fight, it exhibits classic PUP traits. If you have it, you should be able to remove it using Malwarebytes Adwcleaner (www.malwarebytes.com/adwcleaner).
I avoided downloading simpliclean by closing then deleting Xara’s installer. It’s not a happy ending, though. Finding junk in this otherwise excellent program was a disappointment. It’s not as though Xara’s owner Magix needs the money. Its new paid-for Web Designer 365 software is wrapped in terms so opaque they might as well be written upside-down in Greek. It’s ‘not a subscription service’, insists the website – but you’ll lose features unless you upgrade every year. Uh-huh. Remember when you used to be able to pay £50 for a CD of junk-free software, then keep it forever? Ah, memories.
A voter registration site for the EU referendum crashed on 7 June last year, just before the deadline to sign up The Government extended the deadline by 48 hours, angering many ‘Vote Leave’ campaigners MPS say that the site may have been knocked offline by foreign hackers in order to influence the result