

Ongoing MacKeeper fraud - zdw
http://www.thesafemac.com/ongoing-mackeeper-fraud/

======
lpsz
As a Mac user (and someone who spends most of the day in Xcode), I feel lucky
to have a machine that generally works most of the time and I don't need to
defrag it, virus-scan it, memory-clean it, watch running processes for free
RAM, and so on and so forth. So, I feel really bad for users who feel duped
into downloading things like this -- they get a subpar computer as a result,
and they totally don't have to.

~~~
abalone
The #3 app in the mac app store is "Memory Clean", and apparently it was
featured by Apple as an "invaluable utility" and won a Macworld award.

This is really strange to me because, like you, I thought OSX's native memory
management ought to be optimal and tools like this are just placebos.

~~~
akhatri_aus
I've tried to observe how this app works.

It actually forces OS X's native memory management to kick in.

It does this by using an obscene amount of memory for a very short amount of
time. This forces OS X to clean up the existing RAM in use as the RAM used by
Memory Cleaner builds up dramatically.

In this way its partially cosmetic since your RAM would be cleaned up if you
used more of it anyway.

~~~
kenrikm
There are tricks that iOS Devs (including me) use to make iOS cleanup after
itself, for example iOS can take its sweet time releasing memory from
MKMapViews even after the controller is gone so a trick is to switch the Map
Type just before the controller is released as it forces iOS to drop the cache
for the current map type. So yeah, I've not used that program but I assume
it's using similar tricks in OSX.

~~~
lpsz
But that's talking about memory usage tricks _within_ a process, which is a
totally different beast from what this app claims to do.

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patcheudor
You can tell a lot about the legitimacy of a company in the "security space"
by their SSL/TLS config on key sites. As of this reply they've still not
patched / disabled SSLv3 to guard against POODLE.

[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=store.mackeep...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=store.mackeeper.com)

~~~
amenghra
You should not blindly believe ssllabs.com without spending time further
digging into the results. For example, some sites have decided to keep sslv3
but only support ciphers which are not prone to Poodle.

I'm not saying it's the case here, but be cautious about blindly believing
everything ssllabs.com reports.

~~~
patcheudor
Where sites have chosen to keep SSLv3 and mitigate via cipher selection
SSLLabs makes note of it without impacting the overall score: "This server
uses SSL 3, with POODLE mitigated. Still, it's recommended that this protocol
is disabled."

~~~
amenghra
I was going to say it's not always the case, but you are right! Thanks for
pointing that out.

------
weinzierl
I'm 100% sure that in the past MacKeeper was recommended on support.apple.com
(not discussions.apple.com).

As far as I remember it was a page with three suggestions, not unlike [1] and
the last one was to install MacKeeper. MacKeeper was just mentioned, but not
linked which appeared odd to me at the time. This was about two years ago.

Unfortunately I couldn't find the page anywhere, not even at archive.org.

[1] [http://support.apple.com/en-us/ht1147](http://support.apple.com/en-
us/ht1147)

------
leeber
I always get mackeeper popups when I'm on porn sites.

~~~
atmosx
Yes like everybody else. A friend of mine, asked me twice, if this _MacKeeper_
will keep his mac safe. I told him it's a simple spyware and he has to avoid
it like the plague.

It's kinda widespread software among mac users, because you can find banners
literally in every website with _disputable_ content like porn, torrents,
subtitles, you-name-it.

~~~
FreeFull
I wonder if anything like that, but targeted at linux, will ever come up.

~~~
slaman
It would have already if there was the market share.

~~~
atmosx
Hm hardly. The average linux user is something like 100 times more skilled,
computer-wise, than your average windows/mac user. That's why IMHO it's highly
unlikely that a Linux Desktop based malware will ever reach big numbers. Those
linux people are mostly geeks, they can tell easily if something is going
wrong...

~~~
slaman
I disagree.. If linux had a larger market share you'd see users that weren't
'100x more skilled' and advertising a cleanup program would be viable.

Permission structure of *nix is the same, and fools can be fools anywhere. A
30% market share for linux doesn't mean 30% of computer users gain 100x the
skill overnight.

