March 31, 2009 in Other, Tools by Mark Levison

A few weeks ago I need to capture the output of a program in the form of a PDF. A few minutes googling led me to PDF Creator (hosted at SourceForge). The application itself is great however when you install it a toolbar is bundled with it pdfforge. You don’t get an option its simply installed on your behalf – as ‘benefit’. The worst parts of the license agreement are below:

1.1 Rights You Grant to Spigot.
By installing the Toolbar on your computer, you expressly authorize and request Spigot to:
a) act as your search agent to conduct inquiries on your behalf using Spigot’s search engine and technologies and partners’ sites, and collect relevant information and display it to you;
b) take actions Spigot deems appropriate to provide the Toolbar to you and to act on your behalf in obtaining information from partners and displaying that to you;
c) read and interpret your search requests and results on certain sites and use this information to conduct searches on your behalf, offer alternative results and to personalize The Toolbar for you;
…

f) modify your Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Mozilla Firefox browser settings for the default search engine, address bar search, “DNS error” page, “404 error” page, and new tab page to facilitate more informative responses as determined by The Toolbar;
…

The real offender here is stealing 404 error pages. At my current client my wireless internet connection is sometimes less than perfect and when I ‘404’ errors I was redirected to Urlseek’s obnoxious website (sorry I won’t link to this crap). Some digging proves that you can uninstall the toolbar separately from the PDF creator, but even so this is low underhanded and unpleasant. In addition I suspect Sourceforge would be a little unhappy to hear that this nastiness is hosted on their site.

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