HN user
Most big businesses in Russia work with grey schemes. One of the reason not so many foreign companies here, as they forbidden to pay bribes. Yet most people get payed in white. Some hire people by contracts as invidial entrepreneurs so they don't pay 54% of taxes for them, plus theese employes pay only 6% from their salaray instead of 13% to government.
Dmitriy Potapenko sounded this number, when were interviewed about taxation in Russia and Czech Republic. And he owns big retail networks, restaurants and etc. For example McDonalds to cut taxes is working as shops, not as restaurants :)
In Russia if you don't minimize taxation with tricks and do it straight, you pay like 1,2$ for each 1$ your company makes. So mostly companies aims for super profitable niches, like selling chinese shit with 1000-5000% margin.
They just burning money, it'll collapse before 2015. Probably trying to bloat the cost of the company for the successful exit.
I block ads cause i don't want to deceive advertisers :) i never buy anything through banners.
I'm surprised software catalogs are still alive :D Especially when you can get literally everything you need from torrents with keygens/cracks.
I've worked in Moscow ^.^ all tech staff has been outsourced to different countries - Germany, Russia, India and etc.
It's just my humble opinion as an internet marketer :) i'm not related to CNET atm, worked there as tech for some time. And i think it's really an ingenious idea with wrapper, maybe not so good with all that toolbars. Maybe it's crapware and they lose like all geeks, 20% publishers and 30-40% users maximum - they still will be like x10 profitable than before. Don't get me wrong but Google wasted like hundreds of millions on unprofitable YouTube, and now they airing this shitty advertisements that are so fucking annoying %) luckily there are all theese adblock extensions out there.
Pff i just know the kitchen as i worked there for some time :) It's not a trojan or malware for sure. 3/43, http://www.virustotal.com/file-scan/report.html?id=cb2428c76...
Some crappy adware? probably :)
They do not injecting it, it's just a small downloader that helps to download applications even with bad connection. And potentially may use a p2p distribution, as for example some game developers upload their game clients(>1gb). Well-known companies pay per download for their software suits, and they don't really like to pay for the interrupted downloads.
Im not sure about the deceptive tactics, they just trying to get people attention, not just unmarking checkboxes without reading.
Everything on CNET is being tested manually with VirusTotal. If it gets at least 4 positives/false positives from 43 antivirus engines they don't publish it or work with it, until developers get things settled down with anti-virus/anti-malware companies. They get not that much profit from paid accounts cause of small percentage of subscribers, and give away tons of traffic + man hours even for free products. That includes manual testing, checking and writing descriptions, reviewing, and that repeats for each update. And lots of companies update their products like 10 times a week, just to get bumped in search, or create like 20 versions of 1 program under different names, especially Chinese developers. So they just monetizing traffic and stimulating developers to get subscriptions to remove ad for their products. I personally hate all kind of that toolbar stuff, but hey, there are not so many ways to promote an alternative search engines that work for free.