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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

The terrible experience of pulling down an installer for Paint.net was one of the final straws that pushed me to move over to using chocolatey for windows workstation setup.

   > choco install paint.net

Unfortunately, while that allows me to never see fake download-button ads when pulling down software for my machine, one place it's still a nightmare in is the world of getting minecraft mods installed on a kid's computer. Picking out the real download link from among all the fake ads is sometimes a real challenge.

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Yep, the only time I've ever managed to install malware was trying to put a very ordinary Minecraft mod on for my kid. How to feel stupid in one easy move.

Don't feel too hard on yourself. While I do not think I've installed malware because of that, I've mostly been lucky I guess (or just haven't noticed the malware yet).

The stars are aligned against you on this:

1) impatient kid who wants his mod working,

2) unfamiliar territory for you,

3) the timing for these things is ALWAYS wrong, you've probably got pressing household matters to attend to or another kid wanting your attention,

4) a couple of more points I forgot.

I was going to say - obviously the author of this post hasn't looked for Minecraft mods, because there the problem is far worse.

is it? 99% of the mods nowadays can be downloaded from Curse [1] without any ads and for easy mod management you can even install their launcher

those that can't, can be usually found on this site with their official download site linked [2]

[1] https://minecraft.curseforge.com/ [2] https://bot.notenoughmods.com/

>and for easy mod management you can even install their launcher

Does that launcher ask for the username and password?

That's a pretty lousy message to be teaching mostly children about password security.

no it does not, it launches the vanilla client in which you enter your username and password so it goes directly to Mojang! the launcher (technically a wrapper around the normal launcher) was recently rebranded to Twitch Launcher since Amazon (Twitch) bought Curse

https://mods.curse.com/client

Ah, that's good. Thanks for the correction.

Or FeedTheBeast

You can thank the community's reliance on scummy ad-laded URL shorteners like Adfly for that. It seems like every time I'm going through an adfly link, there's a fake download button.

Worse, they've got fairly effective adblock detection.

Have you got uBlock Origin installed?

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