Named & Shamed
Junk offender: Fake ‘download’ buttons
Junk Offender: fake ‘download’ buttons.
Jonathan Parkyn puts the boot into tech villains, jargonspouting companies and software stuffed with junk
You’ll often find me using this column to expose programs that silently fill your hard drive with junk during installation. But there’s another way sneaky software makers litter our computers – by tricking us into downloading the wrong software in the first place.
This underhand practice was recently highlighted by reader John Torrance, who wrote to us about Paint.net, which we recently recommended in Best Free Software (Issue 560, page 18). When John tried to download it, he found that all he got were “diversions to a whole string of PUPS”.
It should be said that Paint.net itself is a fantastic program and its installer is entirely clean of PUPS. But its download page ( www.getpaint.net/download.html) is confusingly presented. There are two different versions of the program – one a paid-for app available from the Microsoft Store, the other a free desktop version, which is hosted on a separate website ( www.dotpdn.com). Additionally, the free
version requires Microsoft’s .NET Framework 4.7.2, which is automatically installed if it isn’t already on your system.
Worst of all, though, is the fact that both websites prominently display adverts disguised as download links. Look carefully at the small print in our screenshot above and you’ll see the Download button is actually an ad for the paid-for imageediting tool Corel Paintshop Pro.
Paint.net isn’t the only software provider that’s guilty of providing a confusing download method. But the chief culprits here are the advertisers, who clearly design their ads to look like download buttons in order to trick site visitors into installing software they don’t want.
Online advertising needs to be regulated to prevent this type of practice from happening. In the meantime, a decent ad blocker – ublock Origin ( www.snipca. com/32566), for example – will screen out most of these fake download links.