This, of course, could have been achieved in one simple step, without the nonsense of the junk-filled installer, by simply downloading the disk image straight from the XLD website. If you read those terms, you will notice that they ask you to agree to the install of a number of different undesirable programs, as well as changing of your search engine and home page.Īfter finishing with the installation, all that happens is that the XLD disk image is downloaded and opened. The next screen, though, should raise some serious red flags… assuming that you don’t do what most people do and simply click past the terms and conditions without reading them. The window that opened would have alleviated my concerns slightly, if I didn’t know better, since it did mention the app that I had gone looking for: However, since it was a test system and I didn’t really have anything to fear, I opened it. Right away, this is something that I wouldn’t normally touch with a ten-foot pole. Opening the disk image shows nothing but an app named CNET-Installer. If you download the app from, however, you will end up with a cryptically-named disk image file that does not seem to have any relation to the program in question. The program that brought this issue to my attention is called X Lossless Decoder (aka XLD), an open-source app for dealing with a number of lossless audio file formats. Upon downloading that file and opening it in a test system, I found that it behaved exactly as I suspected.

This was first brought to my attention by a post on the Apple Support Communities, in which it was discovered that a number of new browser extensions were added following the install of a program that had been downloaded from. Unfortunately, I have just found hard evidence that these practices are continuing, almost 2 years later, with Mac downloads. This in particular angered Fyodor, the developer of the open source network mapping tool Nmap, so severely that he sent a strongly-worded e-mail to a security mailing list, leading to CNET being widely reviled by the developer community. In particular, they have been known to insert their own adware in downloaded installers, contrary to the wishes (and without the knowledge) of the developers whose software is being hijacked. October 29th, 2013 at 8:41 AM EDT, modifiedĭ has been accused of unethical behavior in the past.

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