
Adobe wants Ninite to stop rolling out crapware-free Flash - mih
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/01/adobe_says_no/
======
doron
We use Ninite Pro extensively within our network. Not only does it allow
remote updates (whereas locally it requires administrative rights most users
don't have) it also allows disabling of update notification and disabling of
shortcuts.

The update process Adobe employs is a nag for admins, the constant flow of
acrobat updates and flash updates is a bombardment of announcements which most
users in a corporate environment don't have control over.

I prefer paying ninite for the hassle free service, rather then adobe who seem
to have no clue or interest in making users life easier. From my perspective,
i don't care who profits as long as I can achieve my goals with a minimum of
hassle. Ninite provides this, Adobe does not.

~~~
m0nty
As a sys admin in a school, Ninite is awesome. I really don't want installers
and updaters popping up in front of small children and (often, technically
illiterate) staff, and Ninite facilitates this. At the same time, it makes it
easy for me to update software at a time to suit me - usually the holidays.
The fact it denies Adobe the chance to trick me (or my users) into installing
additional, unwanted software is a major bonus. It just means I don't have to
visit users' PCs later to uninstall the crap.

~~~
l0c0b0x
(School Sys admin here too)... We don't use Ninite, but at my old job I looked
at the implementation and liked the fact that you can have a local-central
repository (This saves bandwidth and keeps things in our control).

~~~
m0nty
It depends on the number of users, but I found it was very affordable for my
network. I think it's less than $200 for the year. Beats using GPOs via Active
Directory, visiting each machine in turn, or relying on users to do it (which
is largely impossible anyway). The central repository is handy, but the
software expires fairly quickly in some cases so it's most useful when I'm
updating many PCs at once. If you can persuade your finance dept to fork out
some money, I would recommend it.

~~~
noinsight
Any larger company should be using SCCM or e.g. Miradore for configuration
management anyway, so Ninite doesn't seem that useful.

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JohnTHaller
This article is a bit... lacking. First off, the Flash updater on Windows
works quite well on modern Windows systems. Second off, Ninite isn't just some
good Samaritan, they're a for-profit company. Third, and related to the
second, Ninite's updater costs $10 a year while Adobe Flash's built-in updater
is free. They also have a Ninite Pro version that supports remote updates and
installs and costs $240 to $2,220 per year.

In a similar vein, this is why Piriform cut them off from providing CCleaner
via Ninite. Because automatic updating is a feature of CCleaner's business
model, too. The paid version of CCleaner has automatic updates. Ninite was
essentially taking that revenue model away from Piriform and using it for
themselves. With free software supported by offers, Ninite is hiding those
offers in exchange for cash. It's basically a paid ad-blocking service.

~~~
protospork
> First off, the Flash updater on Windows works quite well on modern Windows
> systems.

Speak for yourself; I only ever see it on system startup. I only reboot once
every few months (and it doesn't respond to waking up from standby), but
there's a new Adobe security panic every two weeks or so, so that's not really
acceptable. Plus it opens as a pop-under window for some reason, so I'm
generally unaware of it until I've opened a browser, which I'll then have to
close and reopen.

The 'stealing revenue' argument is definitely valid, but in Adobe's case it's
such a hateful method that I can't sympathize at all.

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
Adobe lost any credibility in this argument when they 'accidentally' pushed
out a Flash update that sideloaded McAfee.

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SideburnsOfDoom
Title here is wrong, the reg says "crapware-free Flash". This dash is a little
thing but it does matter; it changes the meaning. I passed over this article
all day, after I read the headline as "stop rolling out flash, which is
crapware, free".

Punctuation. It's the difference between "Let's eat, Grandma" and "Let's eat
Grandma"

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Update: It's been fixed now. Good, thanks.

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artmageddon
It's a real shame that Adobe is making this kind of mandate of Ninite. The
Ninite catalog is a little limited for me given that I'm a developer, but when
it comes to setting up a new PC(or a reformatted one)for friends and family,
Ninite is the first place I go to for all programs and utilities they need,
and most likely the last as well.

On the one hand I can see why Adobe wants total control over their installers,
but I really wish they could also see that a lot of people simply don't want
it.

~~~
giulianob
<http://chocolatey.org/> is starting to gain some traction for dev tools.

~~~
Already__Taken
I would expect powershell access to the windows store might just kill this
project over night. I kind of hope so actually, nice official repository
system native from MS.

~~~
TillE
If by "kill overnight" you mean "partially replace over the next few years",
yeah maybe. But there will always be plenty of apps not on the Windows Store
for various reasons.

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mschuster91
I wonder how the "toolbar providers" actually make money. I mean, I work as a
freelance IT guy, and on nearly every customer PC I find ~6-10 toolbars, 2-3
"free virus scanners" and >10 different youtube downloaders (which mostly
brought the toolbars). With such an infestation (and given this, the
competition between the toolbars), how do the individual toolbar providers get
back the money they paid to the trojan horse software?

~~~
bluedino
Referral links/searches

~~~
mschuster91
Sure, but how can this game be successful when the toolbar is active /
dominant in the browser only for a couple of days until the user downloads yet
another crapware bundle?

~~~
joosters
I wonder if any of the toolbars have extra code to try and nobble further
toolbar installers. Perhaps there is a coding war going on between the
crapware providers, fighting to be the top of the URL-rewriting chain?

~~~
mschuster91
Likely they have. I had to completely wipe a Firefox profile of a customer
because ten toolbars had messed up the search engines so hard that I could not
add Google back.

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ChikkaChiChi
Ninite was a godsend in the days before I moved our offices over to Chrome. It
was the first tool that took the pain and suffering out of updating Reader,
Flash, and Java without the worries of crapware ending up on workstations.

Thanks to this move, I'll be banning the flash plugin outright. I hope that
makes Adobe happy.

~~~
Finster
With Netflix moving to HTML5, and Youtube already supporting HTML5, there's
fewer reasons to even bother with Flash or Silverlight plugins.

~~~
pyre
Except for the videos on YouTube that don't support HTML5 yet. From here[1]:

    
    
      | Additional Restrictions (we are working on these!)
      | 
      | - Some videos with ads are not yet supported (they
      |   will play in the Flash player)
      |
      | - On Firefox and Opera, only videos with WebM
      |   transcodes will play in HTML5
      |
      | - If you've opted in to other testtube experiments,
      |   you may not get the HTML5 player (Feather is
      |   supported, though)
    

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/html5>

~~~
ancarda
The YouTube HTML 5 player is basically done now, it works just as well as the
flash one. I wish they would stop "experimenting" and roll this out across the
site. They seem to have no timeframe for releasing it.

------
chrisbennet
I just got so sick of the Adobe updates (and their failures to update) that I
uninstalled all of it on my work machine.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Just use Chrome... Boom, Adobe is no longer your problem.

~~~
gcp
Get Ebola...Boom, AIDS is no longer your (worst) problem.

Being forced to use a specific browser hardly means "it's no longer your
problem".

~~~
jcastro
Firefox also has a built in pdf viewer now too.

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robmcm
I imagine this is Adobe trying to milk some final money out of flash. After
all they are still having to support it and will do for a good few years.

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ChuckMcM
It would be an interesting interpretation of the CFAA to bring charges against
Adobe for interfering with the security and managing of a computer network.

------
sauce71
Noticed it was gone from Ninite yesterday. Good riddance and a nice one of
Ninite I thought. Still on fresh Windows 7 the Adobe monster suddenly
appeared. Not sure where it came from, IE10 or Chrome?

------
w1ntermute
Can anyone with a legal background explain if Adobe can actually force Ninite
to change the way their software works? AFAICT, they can't. Why did this guy
give in to Adobe? Because they've got an army of lawyers they can attack him
with?

~~~
DannyBee
Yes, they can legally stop ninite from redistributing the installer using the
installer license terms if they like. It's a dick move, but not illegal

~~~
w1ntermute
But Ninite isn't redistributing the installer, is it? It's downloading it
directly from Adobe's site when the user runs it, just like if the user were
to manually download Flash.

~~~
swies
That's right, we did no redistribution or modification of their software.
Ninite just automates things you would do.

But, publishers can license their software under whatever terms they want.
They could forbid this sort of automation in the license, or even forbid
Ninite specifically by name. As far as we can tell there's no right to
automate your own machine that prohibitions like that would be violating.

I think the only defense here is public backlash (thanks everyone!) and/or
boycott.

~~~
w1ntermute
> publishers can license their software under whatever terms they want. They
> could forbid this sort of automation in the license, or even forbid Ninite
> specifically by name. As far as we can tell there's no right to automate
> your own machine that prohibitions like that would be violating.

You're referring to the EULA, right? Is that enforceable in court? I've heard
mixed opinions in the past on this topic from legal experts.

~~~
DannyBee
The usual issues in EULAs are either public policy concerns with particular
terms, or consent issues.

I don't think either would come into play here.

------
riotingpscifis
If you live in a closed source ecosystem, you die in a closed source
ecosystem.

e.g If you want to distribute closed source tools and software without sorting
out a license first, your going to have a hard time because often this is
exactly how free (in terms of price) software companies make their money.

------
digitalengineer
Never had this problem of Adobe installing unwanted Anti-Virus stuff. Is this
common for Window-users? For Mac I would suggest Pacifist if you want to
install selective parts of an installer: <http://www.charlessoft.com/>

~~~
Svip
Yes, it is common on Windows. When you are on their website to install Flash,
there is a tick box you need to untick to avoid installing McAfee Anti-Virus
with it. It is basically like the Ask toolbar bundled with Java.

If you are not paying attention - which most people don't - you'll be
installing unwanted software, because so much relies on basically crappy
software (Flash and Java). Actually, that makes them crappy is their
ubiquitousness. Even if you seldom use Flash or Java applets, you'll often
find yourself having them installed, because there is that one site that needs
one or the other.

Now, people like us with the technical knowhow know how to get around that
(disable plugins; flashblock, etc.), but most people just install these things
whenever there are updates, each is a change of getting crapware along with
them. And Java is quite often updated.

~~~
FreezerburnV
As a developer, I kind of take offense to the allegations of Java (and Flash
as well, I suppose, it's supposed to be pretty good) being "crappy software".
The JVM is actually a rather awesome piece of software which offers good
performance and good garbage collection. And interesting new languages have
been created and flourished on top of the JVM. (Scala, Clojure)

Please know the difference between bad/customer unfriendly handling of
installers/updaters, and actually bad software.

~~~
zdw
Take a look at the security record of both in browser plugin scenarios and get
back to us on that...

While Java admittedly has a solid underlying core, the criticism is for the
entire platform, which has some significant problems, some technical, some
security, and many organizational.

~~~
FreezerburnV
I'll definitely admit that the browser plugin is a piece of crap which should
be moved away from. Sadly, there's still a ways to go for that as a number of
countries use them pretty extensively. (bank interfaces are brought up a lot
on HN) And yes, organizationally they definitely have some problems. The JVM
has still been making progress though, with new garbage collectors and project
lambda.

That said, I'm not sure what technical problems you're referring to. The JVM
seems to work quite well on all platforms, even if it can be kinda clunky to
program in Java at times. (which is part of the reason I mentioned other
languages) And yes, I know the JVM is slow to start. It isn't designed for
small scripts. Use Python or something else for that.

------
eclipticplane
I used Ninite at my old job; loved it!

However, if Adobe were to force Ninite to drop Flash -- we would have quickly
dropped Flash from our corporate network, and probably have been for the
better even with a few users complaining that their favorite time-wasting
website/game no longer works.

------
burpee
I see a fairly simple solution. The issue Adobe has is essentially that Ninite
is taking away the choice of users to install this software when installing
Adobe Flash. Ninite is therefore taking away the revenue that Adobe would get
from these installs, if you were to assume that some users actually want them.

Ninite could easily circumvent this by giving people a choice to include the
adware. 99.999% of users obviously won't make that choice, but Ninite puts
that responsibility back with its users.

------
koshak
I've recently got all JRE and flash players vanished from my enterprise.

What I love about linux is that almost always you have an interface to manage
software (apt/fabric/etc...) out-of-the-box.

Ninite Pro. Ok, not bad. But personally I don't like the "subscription" model.

Making software bundles, rolling them out and updating them can be made by IT
dep. itself. It's not such a great and difficult job.

And again, how about clenaup with Ninite? When I decide to use its bundle will
it manage older versions of %SOFTWARENAME% for me?

------
shaaaaawn
Ninite is an incredibly useful product Shame on you Adobe

------
guard-of-terra
The pains people come through to avoid Linux.

------
unangst
Great read. Two thumbs up to Ninite!

------
mariusmg
Here's how to remove the shitty Flash autoupdater on Windows :

schtasks /delete /tn "Adobe Flash Player Updater"

------
minopret
Ugh, "coalface admins". If I can hope to influence anyone's usage, I'll advise
against using "coalface" as an adjective for people. I realize that a coalface
is a place where a worker turns a resource into a commodity. But the word
"coalface" is too much like "blackface". In fact it is used that way in regard
to birds and cats. It risks distracting people with disturbing connotations,
particularly here in the United States.

~~~
hga
Rather than complain about a U.K. publication's possible refusal to play the
PC game, or ignorance of how coalface _might_ be stretched to connote
blackface (a word that is certainly less freighted over there), why not learn
the term as the British use it, e.g.:

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=coal%20face>

"Originally used with reference to miners i.e those who remove coal from the
'face' of the mine, its now more commonly used to mean any work closest to the
frontline

" _Managers have no idea how hard it is for a sparky these days because they
never have to work at the coal face.

"I love pulling apart engines. Its great to get my hands dirty at the coal
face._"

It's actually complementary to most of us....

~~~
minopret
Yet I wouldn't write "(I) have dirty hands" where I mean "(I) get (my) hands
dirty".

We'll all choose our own words. Good luck to us all, and may the best of us
succeed.

