WARNING: JUNK AHEAD
Junk offender: Pivot
I enjoy messing around with computer graphics, but I’m no expert – so I was delighted to come across Pivot ( www. pivotsoftware.com), a free animation program designed for beginners. It’s impressive how easily you can create stick figures, and make them walk, run, jump and dance with just a few clicks.
What’s less impressive is the unwanted junk that the installer also drops on to your PC. In this case the culprits are our old friends, Yahoo and Avast Free Antivirus, which seem to have wormed their way into a lot of free software of late.
They’re an insidious pair. The Yahoo software messes with your internet settings. If you’re using Internet Explorer or Firefox, your home page and search settings are changed, with no obvious way to restore them. Avast Free Antivirus, meanwhile, starts throwing up alerts and adverts encouraging you to upgrade to Avast’s paid-for suite. It’s an unacceptable level of intrusion for a program you never asked for in the first place.
I was also irked by the way the Pivot installer railroads you into accepting these. If you want to install the main program without junk, it’s not as simple as unticking a box – you have to pay close attention to the text on each page, and hop back and forth between the Accept and Decline buttons (see bottom of screenshot) as you go through the process.
Even the timing of the two offers is sneaky. The Yahoo page pops up right at the start of the process, then the installer starts copying the Pivot files on to your hard drive. Once it’s finished, your instinct is probably to click through the final window to close the installer. Do that and you’ve just agreed to install Avast Free Antivirus.
As I’ve said before, neither Yahoo nor Avast are dangerous in themselves. But we don’t want these intrusive items on our computers, and the publishers know it – that’s why they resort to underhand tactics to trick us into accepting them. If you’re keen to take your first steps in animation, Pivot itself is worth a look, but keep your eyes peeled during the installation and give the junk a miss.