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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

It's a nice racket Oracle has. Every time they release a security fix, they make a few hundred thousand bucks on drive-by installs. Security holes as business model.

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They don't even need to release a fix. I have been prompted to update several times in the past year, where I go through the install process (including having to uncheck the Ask box), only to get the message at the end that version x.y.x is already installed.

The updater is just plain buggy. Ed Bott mentioned the problems with limited user accounts, but I didn't see him mention the issue with jucheck ignoring the update settings:

http://superuser.com/questions/130961/how-to-stop-jucheck-fr...

I also had an XP system where the %appdata% environment variable somehow got deleted. This completely breaks the installer.

Is the Ask.com toolbar installed before or after Java, and if java fails will ask.com be rolled back?

When you check for the Ask toolbar and click next in the Java installer, the toolbar installer is fired off in the background, and installs itself after 10 minutes, regardless of what you do with the Java installer.

That's incredibly shady.

In the original article he details that the Ask updater waits patiently for 10 minutes after the Java installation completes (probably successfully or unsuccessfully) before launching as a background process.

Talk about maximizing your income. I'm also bewildered that a new install of java is set to only check for updates every month. Wha?

I picture some Oracle bean counters decided that once a month toolbar installs is decent revenue for them without pounding their update servers too much with requests to see if the new version is out.

Also, where is ask.com getting all this cash? I don't know anyone who uses it.

> I don't know anyone who uses it.

Apparently most people who use Java use the ask.com toolbar. </sarcasm off> Edit: With the ask.com toolbar installed, it also changes your default search provider, and it is very hard to put it back in some cases. So I'm sure that's where they get their money to pay for the drive-by install.

Pretty much a Tony Soprano-like racket.

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