Malwarebytes warning

Ophelia wrote:


"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in message
...
In message , Ophelia
writes:
[]
May I tag on here to ask your opinion on CCleaner?

Hello again (-:!

In general, and particularly on this 'group, it's unwise to tag on with
that sort of change, since (in this case) those who have views on
CCleaner
may have dropped out of what seems to be a pro/anti Malwarebytes thread.

But anyway: the general consensus here seems to be that CC is in
general a
Good Thing, as long as you don't use its registry cleaning facility.

Ahh! I run both each day before I close down!!

So! I have stopped using it as of NOW!

Thanks very much!

CCleaner has more than one function.

You might find the users in this group, use some
of the file cleaning functions (clean out %temp%
for example). Whereas registry cleaning would
be turned off.

I don't use CCleaner myself, and clean out a couple
of locations manually. And I've *never* *ever* used
a registry cleaner. I'm opposed to the idea on
practical grounds. It's like putting an extra
coating of wax on your car, because you think
the improvement in drag coefficient will reduce
your gasoline bills :-) When all it really does
is make the car look shiny.

Paul

"Paul" wrote in message
...
Ophelia wrote:


"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in message
...
In message , Ophelia
writes:
[]
May I tag on here to ask your opinion on CCleaner?

Hello again (-:!

In general, and particularly on this 'group, it's unwise to tag on with
that sort of change, since (in this case) those who have views on
CCleaner
may have dropped out of what seems to be a pro/anti Malwarebytes thread.

But anyway: the general consensus here seems to be that CC is in general
a
Good Thing, as long as you don't use its registry cleaning facility.

Ahh! I run both each day before I close down!!

So! I have stopped using it as of NOW!

Thanks very much!

CCleaner has more than one function.

You might find the users in this group, use some
of the file cleaning functions (clean out %temp%
for example). Whereas registry cleaning would
be turned off.

I don't use CCleaner myself, and clean out a couple
of locations manually. And I've *never* *ever* used
a registry cleaner. I'm opposed to the idea on
practical grounds. It's like putting an extra
coating of wax on your car, because you think
the improvement in drag coefficient will reduce
your gasoline bills :-) When all it really does
is make the car look shiny.

Understood) Thanks very much, Paul!


--
http://www.helpforheroes.org.uk/shop/

"Paul" wrote in message ...

Ophelia wrote:


"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in message
...
In message , Ophelia
writes:
[]
May I tag on here to ask your opinion on CCleaner?

Hello again (-:!

In general, and particularly on this 'group, it's unwise to tag on with
that sort of change, since (in this case) those who have views on
CCleaner
may have dropped out of what seems to be a pro/anti Malwarebytes thread.

But anyway: the general consensus here seems to be that CC is in general
a
Good Thing, as long as you don't use its registry cleaning facility.

Ahh! I run both each day before I close down!!

So! I have stopped using it as of NOW!

Thanks very much!

CCleaner has more than one function.

You might find the users in this group, use some
of the file cleaning functions (clean out %temp%
for example). Whereas registry cleaning would
be turned off.

I don't use CCleaner myself, and clean out a couple
of locations manually. And I've *never* *ever* used
a registry cleaner. I'm opposed to the idea on
practical grounds. It's like putting an extra
coating of wax on your car, because you think
the improvement in drag coefficient will reduce
your gasoline bills :-) When all it really does
is make the car look shiny.

Paul

Total nonsense, Paul. Registry cleaners are amazing!!!
Just go on the Internet and see ALL those glowing reviews on how using
'this' Registry Cleaner sped up their computer to make it at least 100 times
faster!!!
And it only costs around $50, much cheaper than hiring a a tech work on your
computer!!!!

Just kidding of course.

Yes, I think CCleaner is well worth while for many things. I am not sure why
they even include the Registry cleaning feature, because it is the one main
thing that can cause problems. I really like the rest of it features,
including the 'save' cookies feature.

--
Buffalo

| May I tag on here to ask your opinion on CCleaner?
|

After the heated posts over MB I guess I should
be wary of irking a possible CCleaner fan club.

I've never used CCleaner. I'd certainly agree with
the others that so-called Registry cleaning is not a
good idea. As for the other cleaning, most of it is
easy to do without software. Other things, like wiping
the Clipboard, are things I try to avoid. Of the list
that the CCleaner page shows, "supercookies" are
probably the only thing that I'd think of as worth
cleaning and also hard to find. (I keep a VBscript on
my Desktop for the numerous TEMP folders. I also
have a script for cleaning supercookies and Flash
cookies, but I don't enable either, so I don't use that.)

I'm skeptical about most system improvement
products. The same people who want to clean up
3 KB of TEMP files often have their system clogged
with unused, bloated or junky software, unorganized
files and unexamined startup and services lists. It's
a lot like cleaning one's car. Even for people who know
something about auto mechanics, there's an irrational
satisfaction in washing the dashboard, vacuuming
the floor, maybe putting in an air freshener. It's like
we've got a special treat for our pet and expect that
the car will be happier and run better. We're
anthropomorhizing a machine. Usually the only thing
the car really needs is a regular oil change.

I view most cleaners similarly. It's satisfying to send
superheroes after bad guys and imagine that our
OS is getting spiffed up, but in general there are
neither superheroes nor bad guys present. There are
just heavily marketed cleaners and improvers that are
more snake oil than functionality.

As an example, look at Registry cleaning. What's
the claim? That unused settings slow things down
and cause problems for software. What's the reality?
You can research it for yourself. Run RegMon or
ProcMon from Sysinternals, then start Internet Explorer.
Don't even load a webpage. Just start the program.
You'll probably see about 5,000 Registry calls in about
1 second from IE alone. Junk calls, over and over. I have
no idea why Microsoft does that, unless it's just to
obfuscate how they use the Registry. But whatever their
reasoning, they make an astonishing number of nonsense
calls to the Registry. The test shows the incredible
efficiency of the Registry. Despite it's size, one can poll
that database 5,000 times in 1 second. So what good
could it possibly do to clean out, say, 1/10,000th of the
Registry values that are not used? The "improvement",
if there is one, probably can't even be measured in
milliseconds.

The other claim is that cleaning the Registry will help
prevent software problems, especially in the case of
COM errors. But like the Microsoft movie control I described
earlier, those errors are generally passive and irrelevant.
Mostly it's dealing with HKCR\CLSID\* and HKCR\*. A
typical example:
When software needs to use a COM library it can look
up in the Registry for either a ProgID or a CLSID. Say that
CCleaner uses its own library, named CHelp.dll, and registers
a COM object from that library when the program installs.
Maybe it creates the key HKCR\CClean.Helper.
Under that key will usually be a CLSID key, with a value like:
{12345678-1234-1234-1234-1234567890AB}

One can then look under:
HKCR\CLSID\{12345678-1234-1234-1234-1234567890AB}

and find a number of subkeys. InProcServer32 or LocalServer32
will provide the path to the library, like maybe
C:\Program Files\CCleaner\Bin\CHelp.dll
The Typelib key will contain another CLSID that points to
yet another series of Registry keys under HKCR\Typelib\,
where the path to the file that contains the typelib for that
library is stored. Other keys will record such things as whether
the library is marked as safe for scripting.... It's a complicated
system that allows software libraries to be "self-describing"
and findable.

[ You can see all this for yourself by looking up common
COM objects in the Registry. For instance, HKCR\SAPI.spVoice,
which probably exists on your machine and should have a
CLSID key that you can then trace to HKCR\CLSID\.
SAPI.spVoice is part of Microsoft's text-to-speech
system. Those Registry settings allow software to use
the spVoice object. ]

Now, imagine that you remove CCleaner and it removes
CHelp.dll but doesn't remove the Registration settings for
its CClean.Helper COM class. Those settings are now rubbish.
But so what? No other software uses CClean.Helper, so no
other software is going to be accessing those Registry
settings, thus no other software is going to crash because
the Registry setting is present while the DLL file is gone.
To clean it is analogous to making books easier to find
in a library of 100,000 books by removing one book that
no one reads or notices.

It's fine to remove the CClean.Helper registration, but
it's not necessary for a clean-running machine, and the
risks of removing things that shouldn't be removed is
always present when using a Registry cleaner. (The
safe way to remove those settings is to unregister
CHelp.dll, but CHelp.dll is now gone, so you can't do that.)

Similarly with other cleaning... You can decide for yourself
by looking at the CCleaner webpage. Do you want to clean
up the things they list? Personally I just run a TEMP
cleaner occasionally. As with the Registry, I'm not worried
about things like shortcut files that are pointing to the
wrong place. They're not doing any harm. If I ever
run across them I can delete them or fix them.

The CCleaner list looks to me more like something one
might want to do to clean all signs of usage from a
borrowed computer. Most people don't normally remove
recent files lists or error logs. Maybe they make their
money from companies that lend out computers and
need to strip personal info? I don't know.

I'm much more concerned with things running that don't
need to: Startup programs and unnecessary and/or risky
services. But even that doesn't need to become a religion
or an ongoing project. And one doesn't need lots of software
to manage it. One doesn't need to be paranoid, as Rene
said. Nor does one need to lazily describe effort as paranoia,
as Rene implied. Using Autoruns from Sysinternals and the
Windows services applet is all that's needed. (Autoruns
is a free, beautifully designed and very comprehensive, yet
simple, startup manager written by a Microsoft programmer.)
Then one just needs to look at what's running, figure out
what each running program or service is, and decide whether
to let it run.

Years ago, during the PC craze of circa 2000, someone
once proudly sent me a picture of his Start Menu, on which
he'd arranged 7 or 8 startup manager programs. He didn't
mention anything about how he was using all those fix-up
tools. That kind of thing reminds me of the teenager who
keeps his car on the lawn, working on it every weekend to
add a new scoop or some such, but who never actually
drives the thing.

| You never used MBAM (the REAL name) while other people use it all the
|
| Let's not let what he calls it divert the discussion: I had no trouble
| understanding him.
|

I actually prefer MB because it simply fulfills
the function of convenient acronym, while
"MBAM" is subtle marketing. (As in, Batman
works for us. We kill bad guys. BAM!

| 2. Granted, some of what he did involves his own software - but at least
| one of the things he did was just change how something Microsoft runs (I
| forget what - might have been how something updates).

There may have been a mixup there, due to
the various turns and sidetracks in this thread.
None of the MB warnings involved my own software.
That was part of the discussion about AV false
positives and Avira. Avira had tagged my software
and actually named the alleged villain. (TR.Dropper.Gen,
which turned out to be a convincing but meaningless
name.) Then they didn't respond when I tried to
contact them.

The EXE MB wanted to delete was from BootIt, which is
an imaging/partitioning program I bought. The Registry
settings were not my specialty and not done by my
software. In the XP Security Center, if one clicks on "Change
the way Security Center alerts me", a window appears
with 3 options, titled "Alert Settings" . (I'm not sure offhand
how it works in Win7.) To uncheck those options is to
choose not to be harassed constantly by warning bubbles
hovering near the system tray.
MB was telling me that my choices in that regard were
"yellow alert" issues. The problem, as I see it, is that MB
is misleading in its presentation, wanting to change my
choice of system settings under the guise of removing
malware. Anyone who allowed that particular fix would
see the return of harassing security bubble messages, but
likely would be mystified as to what was causing them,
because MB didn't explain the connection or even what
the Registry setting related to.

The 4th item is the setting to stop IE from interfering
with downloads, unnecessarily confusing people by telling
them that "their" settings won't let them download the
file they want. That setting, concerning safe file extensions,
may also apply locally. I'm not sure. I just added lots of
file types to the list in order to prevent IE malfunctioning.

I don't know if that qualifies as a "funny thing" I did.
Building ninny-headed security harassment into IE didn't
strike me as being very funny. Stopping that harassment
is a relatively obscure tweak simply because MS didn't
add a setting to choose one's options.

| So because MBAM does not react in wording YOU want, you start warning
| that people should not trust MBAM.
|

Yes, indeed, Fred. I want to warn people to do exactly
what you advised me:

"If you can't handle false positives, don't TRY security software you
don't understand."

Your wisdom was exceeded only by
your succinctness.

"Mayayana" wrote in message
...
| May I tag on here to ask your opinion on CCleaner?
|

After the heated posts over MB I guess I should
be wary of irking a possible CCleaner fan club.

Huh I can't see you afraid of that either g


I've never used CCleaner. I'd certainly agree with
the others that so-called Registry cleaning is not a
good idea. As for the other cleaning, most of it is
easy to do without software. Other things, like wiping
the Clipboard, are things I try to avoid. Of the list
that the CCleaner page shows, "supercookies" are
probably the only thing that I'd think of as worth
cleaning and also hard to find. (I keep a VBscript on
my Desktop for the numerous TEMP folders. I also
have a script for cleaning supercookies and Flash
cookies, but I don't enable either, so I don't use that.)

I don't see anything about supercookies on mine


I'm skeptical about most system improvement
products. The same people who want to clean up
3 KB of TEMP files often have their system clogged
with unused, bloated or junky software, unorganized
files and unexamined startup and services lists. It's
a lot like cleaning one's car. Even for people who know
something about auto mechanics, there's an irrational
satisfaction in washing the dashboard, vacuuming
the floor, maybe putting in an air freshener. It's like
we've got a special treat for our pet and expect that
the car will be happier and run better. We're
anthropomorhizing a machine. Usually the only thing
the car really needs is a regular oil change.

I view most cleaners similarly. It's satisfying to send
superheroes after bad guys and imagine that our
OS is getting spiffed up, but in general there are
neither superheroes nor bad guys present. There are
just heavily marketed cleaners and improvers that are
more snake oil than functionality.

As an example, look at Registry cleaning. What's
the claim? That unused settings slow things down
and cause problems for software. What's the reality?
You can research it for yourself. Run RegMon or
ProcMon from Sysinternals, then start Internet Explorer.
Don't even load a webpage. Just start the program.
You'll probably see about 5,000 Registry calls in about
1 second from IE alone. Junk calls, over and over. I have
no idea why Microsoft does that, unless it's just to
obfuscate how they use the Registry. But whatever their
reasoning, they make an astonishing number of nonsense
calls to the Registry. The test shows the incredible
efficiency of the Registry. Despite it's size, one can poll
that database 5,000 times in 1 second. So what good
could it possibly do to clean out, say, 1/10,000th of the
Registry values that are not used? The "improvement",
if there is one, probably can't even be measured in
milliseconds.

The other claim is that cleaning the Registry will help
prevent software problems, especially in the case of
COM errors. But like the Microsoft movie control I described
earlier, those errors are generally passive and irrelevant.
Mostly it's dealing with HKCR\CLSID\* and HKCR\*. A
typical example:
When software needs to use a COM library it can look
up in the Registry for either a ProgID or a CLSID. Say that
CCleaner uses its own library, named CHelp.dll, and registers
a COM object from that library when the program installs.
Maybe it creates the key HKCR\CClean.Helper.
Under that key will usually be a CLSID key, with a value like:
{12345678-1234-1234-1234-1234567890AB}

One can then look under:
HKCR\CLSID\{12345678-1234-1234-1234-1234567890AB}

and find a number of subkeys. InProcServer32 or LocalServer32
will provide the path to the library, like maybe
C:\Program Files\CCleaner\Bin\CHelp.dll
The Typelib key will contain another CLSID that points to
yet another series of Registry keys under HKCR\Typelib\,
where the path to the file that contains the typelib for that
library is stored. Other keys will record such things as whether
the library is marked as safe for scripting.... It's a complicated
system that allows software libraries to be "self-describing"
and findable.

[ You can see all this for yourself by looking up common
COM objects in the Registry. For instance, HKCR\SAPI.spVoice,
which probably exists on your machine and should have a
CLSID key that you can then trace to HKCR\CLSID\.
SAPI.spVoice is part of Microsoft's text-to-speech
system. Those Registry settings allow software to use
the spVoice object. ]

Now, imagine that you remove CCleaner and it removes
CHelp.dll but doesn't remove the Registration settings for
its CClean.Helper COM class. Those settings are now rubbish.
But so what? No other software uses CClean.Helper, so no
other software is going to be accessing those Registry
settings, thus no other software is going to crash because
the Registry setting is present while the DLL file is gone.
To clean it is analogous to making books easier to find
in a library of 100,000 books by removing one book that
no one reads or notices.

It's fine to remove the CClean.Helper registration, but
it's not necessary for a clean-running machine, and the
risks of removing things that shouldn't be removed is
always present when using a Registry cleaner. (The
safe way to remove those settings is to unregister
CHelp.dll, but CHelp.dll is now gone, so you can't do that.)

Similarly with other cleaning... You can decide for yourself
by looking at the CCleaner webpage.

Ahh that is something I have never seen! I will investigate!

Do you want to clean
up the things they list? Personally I just run a TEMP
cleaner occasionally. As with the Registry, I'm not worried
about things like shortcut files that are pointing to the
wrong place. They're not doing any harm. If I ever
run across them I can delete them or fix them.

The CCleaner list looks to me more like something one
might want to do to clean all signs of usage from a
borrowed computer. Most people don't normally remove
recent files lists or error logs. Maybe they make their
money from companies that lend out computers and
need to strip personal info? I don't know.

I'm much more concerned with things running that don't
need to: Startup programs and unnecessary and/or risky
services. But even that doesn't need to become a religion
or an ongoing project. And one doesn't need lots of software
to manage it. One doesn't need to be paranoid, as Rene
said. Nor does one need to lazily describe effort as paranoia,
as Rene implied. Using Autoruns from Sysinternals and the
Windows services applet is all that's needed. (Autoruns
is a free, beautifully designed and very comprehensive, yet
simple, startup manager written by a Microsoft programmer.)
Then one just needs to look at what's running, figure out
what each running program or service is, and decide whether
to let it run.

Years ago, during the PC craze of circa 2000, someone
once proudly sent me a picture of his Start Menu, on which
he'd arranged 7 or 8 startup manager programs. He didn't
mention anything about how he was using all those fix-up
tools. That kind of thing reminds me of the teenager who
keeps his car on the lawn, working on it every weekend to
add a new scoop or some such, but who never actually
drives the thing.

Thank you Mayayana! You have given me much to think about and I will save
your post to work from!

--
http://www.helpforheroes.org.uk/shop/

On 11/29/2015 10:04 AM, Mayayana wrote:
| May I tag on here to ask your opinion on CCleaner?
|

After the heated posts over MB I guess I should
be wary of irking a possible CCleaner fan club.

I've never used CCleaner. I'd certainly agree with
the others that so-called Registry cleaning is not a
good idea. As for the other cleaning, most of it is
easy to do without software. Other things, like wiping
the Clipboard, are things I try to avoid. Of the list
that the CCleaner page shows, "supercookies" are
probably the only thing that I'd think of as worth
cleaning and also hard to find. (I keep a VBscript on
my Desktop for the numerous TEMP folders. I also
have a script for cleaning supercookies and Flash
cookies, but I don't enable either, so I don't use that.)

I'm skeptical about most system improvement
products. The same people who want to clean up
3 KB of TEMP files often have their system clogged
with unused, bloated or junky software, unorganized
files and unexamined startup and services lists. It's
a lot like cleaning one's car. Even for people who know
something about auto mechanics, there's an irrational
satisfaction in washing the dashboard, vacuuming
the floor, maybe putting in an air freshener. It's like
we've got a special treat for our pet and expect that
the car will be happier and run better. We're
anthropomorhizing a machine. Usually the only thing
the car really needs is a regular oil change.

I view most cleaners similarly. It's satisfying to send
superheroes after bad guys and imagine that our
OS is getting spiffed up, but in general there are
neither superheroes nor bad guys present. There are
just heavily marketed cleaners and improvers that are
more snake oil than functionality.

As an example, look at Registry cleaning. What's
the claim? That unused settings slow things down
and cause problems for software. What's the reality?
You can research it for yourself. Run RegMon or
ProcMon from Sysinternals, then start Internet Explorer.
Don't even load a webpage. Just start the program.
You'll probably see about 5,000 Registry calls in about
1 second from IE alone. Junk calls, over and over. I have
no idea why Microsoft does that, unless it's just to
obfuscate how they use the Registry. But whatever their
reasoning, they make an astonishing number of nonsense
calls to the Registry. The test shows the incredible
efficiency of the Registry. Despite it's size, one can poll
that database 5,000 times in 1 second. So what good
could it possibly do to clean out, say, 1/10,000th of the
Registry values that are not used? The "improvement",
if there is one, probably can't even be measured in
milliseconds.

The other claim is that cleaning the Registry will help
prevent software problems, especially in the case of
COM errors. But like the Microsoft movie control I described
earlier, those errors are generally passive and irrelevant.
Mostly it's dealing with HKCR\CLSID\* and HKCR\*. A
typical example:
When software needs to use a COM library it can look
up in the Registry for either a ProgID or a CLSID. Say that
CCleaner uses its own library, named CHelp.dll, and registers
a COM object from that library when the program installs.
Maybe it creates the key HKCR\CClean.Helper.
Under that key will usually be a CLSID key, with a value like:
{12345678-1234-1234-1234-1234567890AB}

One can then look under:
HKCR\CLSID\{12345678-1234-1234-1234-1234567890AB}

and find a number of subkeys. InProcServer32 or LocalServer32
will provide the path to the library, like maybe
C:\Program Files\CCleaner\Bin\CHelp.dll
The Typelib key will contain another CLSID that points to
yet another series of Registry keys under HKCR\Typelib\,
where the path to the file that contains the typelib for that
library is stored. Other keys will record such things as whether
the library is marked as safe for scripting.... It's a complicated
system that allows software libraries to be "self-describing"
and findable.

[ You can see all this for yourself by looking up common
COM objects in the Registry. For instance, HKCR\SAPI.spVoice,
which probably exists on your machine and should have a
CLSID key that you can then trace to HKCR\CLSID\.
SAPI.spVoice is part of Microsoft's text-to-speech
system. Those Registry settings allow software to use
the spVoice object. ]

Now, imagine that you remove CCleaner and it removes
CHelp.dll but doesn't remove the Registration settings for
its CClean.Helper COM class. Those settings are now rubbish.
But so what? No other software uses CClean.Helper, so no
other software is going to be accessing those Registry
settings, thus no other software is going to crash because
the Registry setting is present while the DLL file is gone.
To clean it is analogous to making books easier to find
in a library of 100,000 books by removing one book that
no one reads or notices.

It's fine to remove the CClean.Helper registration, but
it's not necessary for a clean-running machine, and the
risks of removing things that shouldn't be removed is
always present when using a Registry cleaner. (The
safe way to remove those settings is to unregister
CHelp.dll, but CHelp.dll is now gone, so you can't do that.)

Similarly with other cleaning... You can decide for yourself
by looking at the CCleaner webpage. Do you want to clean
up the things they list? Personally I just run a TEMP
cleaner occasionally. As with the Registry, I'm not worried
about things like shortcut files that are pointing to the
wrong place. They're not doing any harm. If I ever
run across them I can delete them or fix them.

The CCleaner list looks to me more like something one
might want to do to clean all signs of usage from a
borrowed computer. Most people don't normally remove
recent files lists or error logs. Maybe they make their
money from companies that lend out computers and
need to strip personal info? I don't know.

I'm much more concerned with things running that don't
need to: Startup programs and unnecessary and/or risky
services. But even that doesn't need to become a religion
or an ongoing project. And one doesn't need lots of software
to manage it. One doesn't need to be paranoid, as Rene
said. Nor does one need to lazily describe effort as paranoia,
as Rene implied. Using Autoruns from Sysinternals and the
Windows services applet is all that's needed. (Autoruns
is a free, beautifully designed and very comprehensive, yet
simple, startup manager written by a Microsoft programmer.)
Then one just needs to look at what's running, figure out
what each running program or service is, and decide whether
to let it run.

Years ago, during the PC craze of circa 2000, someone
once proudly sent me a picture of his Start Menu, on which
he'd arranged 7 or 8 startup manager programs. He didn't
mention anything about how he was using all those fix-up
tools. That kind of thing reminds me of the teenager who
keeps his car on the lawn, working on it every weekend to
add a new scoop or some such, but who never actually
drives the thing.




When I said you may be a bit paranoid, I meant that you carry things to
a higher level than usual or necessary, probably due to your higher
knowledge level of computer software than most average users.
I use CCleaner occasionally but NEVER the registry cleaner.

the paid version of Malwarebytes works fine for me ( when configured
properly).

Cleaning the car dash might help if you had dust allergies :-))

Regards, Rene

| Cleaning the car dash might help if you had dust allergies :-))
|

Touche.

| I don't see anything about supercookies on mine
|

I got that from their website. They seem to have
a big focus on total cleaning of browser tracks.

Supercookies are a fairly new kind of data storage
that can be used by webpages to store relatively
large amounts of data client-side. They're probably
no worse than a simple web bug or normal cookie,
since those can be used to track you online. But
I don't see any use for them so I set the cache to
0 in Firefox. On the other hand, VanguardLH was
pointing out one day that he likes a game website
that uses supercookies for its functionality. So maybe
some high-interaction sites have justification for
using them.

Buffalo wrote:


Yes, I think CCleaner is well worth while for many things. I am not sure
why they even include the Registry cleaning feature, because it is the
one main thing that can cause problems. I really like the rest of it
features, including the 'save' cookies feature.

I'm willing to take the risk on deleting
the odd registry key myself. Within reason.

I don't want some "automation" digging up a
thousand things and deleting them. One of those
thousand might be the malformed HP printing
installation registry entry, that when removed,
all hell breaks loose. That one doesn't hurt anything
if left alone.

So that's the case I'm worried about. Careless
automation.

Even if a registry cleaner offered a list of what it
proposed to remove, would I want to check
each and every one, Google them, see if side
effects occurred and so on ? I don't think so.

Paul

On Sun, 29 Nov 2015 13:19:00 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:


But anyway: the general consensus here seems to be that CC is in general
a Good Thing, as long as you don't use its registry cleaning facility.


Right!



And that's more because there is strong feeling here that registry
cleaners in general should be avoided, rather than that CC's one is bad.


Right again. In fact, CC's registry cleaner is safer than most of
them.

Ophelia wrote:

I don't see anything about supercookies on mine

To evaluate whether your browser remembers things
it shouldn't, you can check here.

http://samy.pl/evercookie/

There are buttons there for inserting a persistent
cookie into your browser, by using storage not
intended to store identifying materials.

You can then quit the browser, attempt to clean
the browser as best you can, then go back to the
web site, and have it evaluate whether the
cookie is still present or extractable.

On a real web site, if only one portion of the
distributed cookie could still be located, the
site would refresh the cookie into all of its
original locations.

Some of those techniques involve beating on
one of the browser databases, multiple times
in a burst pattern, in an effort to store "fake URLs"
which encode the desired identifying content. And
apparently, you cannot necessarily hear or see this
as a physically detectable symptom. I would think
a CPU core would get pinned for a second
doing stuff like that. So if there is ever
an abnormal freezing of the browser, the
web page content could be trying something
like that using Javascript.

Web site developers have more techniques at
their disposal, than the test implementation
of the idea on that site. So no attempt is
made on that site, to keep the implementation
up to date with the latest tricks. It's good
enough to know some of the tricks, so you
have some idea how they're doing it.

Paul

"Mayayana"
Wed, 25 Nov 2015 14:31:39 GMT in alt.windows7.general, wrote:

| There have been many suggestions over the years NOT to touch
| the Registry repair in MBAM (or anywhere else). I don't have
| the OP's post, but I believe he complained about registry
| damage. Best to avoid letting MBAM touch it.
|
|
| MBAM doesn't perform 'registry repair' It can remove bad/unwanted
| keys and reset others to MS defaults.

You don't call that Registry repair? If not then
we're just quibbling over terminolgy.

No, I don't. I'm a technician by trade, I can't help it if I prefer
to use the correct terminology. It does matter.. atleast in my
profession.


ran listed mostly Registry "threats". It even
made up official sounding names for them. The
tweak to stop IE from blocking downloads gets
the name "PUM.LowRiskFileTypes". Sounds like
a virus. Turns out "PUM" stands for "potentially
unwanted modification". Would you expect
the average person to understand all that?

If it's properly explained to them, yes. As I told you though, I've
already been round and round with the people at Malwarebytes
concerning the naming conventions, years ago. I as you can see,
wasted my time in that respect.

like "PUM.LowRiskFileTypes", and let MB fix them.
Whether you call that repair or not is splitting hairs.

No, it's not. As it's just changing the value of a registry key. it's
not trying to salvage good keys and build new ones to replace the
ones that couldn't be saved. it doesn't try to optimize the registry,
either. It makes no effort to do a 'registry repair'.


--
Error: Creative signature file missing

"Ophelia"
Thu, 26 Nov 2015 12:43:42 GMT
in alt.windows7.general, wrote:

"Mayayana" wrote in message
...
| There have been many suggestions over the years NOT to touch
| the Registry repair in MBAM (or anywhere else). I don't have
| the OP's post, but I believe he complained about registry
| damage. Best to avoid letting MBAM touch it.
|
|
| MBAM doesn't perform 'registry repair' It can remove
| bad/unwanted keys and reset others to MS defaults.

You don't call that Registry repair? If not then
we're just quibbling over terminolgy. The MB I
ran listed mostly Registry "threats". It even
made up official sounding names for them. The
tweak to stop IE from blocking downloads gets
the name "PUM.LowRiskFileTypes". Sounds like
a virus. Turns out "PUM" stands for "potentially
unwanted modification". Would you expect
the average person to understand all that? Many
people might apply the IE nag-stop without
understanding the details. Those same people might
very well run MB, see scary threats with names
like "PUM.LowRiskFileTypes", and let MB fix them.
Whether you call that repair or not is splitting hairs.

Would you not set PUP and PUM to to be 'fixed' automatically?
Even if I saw the thing it was warning against I still wouldn't
have a clue. This is a very interesting thread and it has thrown
things up that concern me. Users like me just trust the stuff to
work! In the past I had dreadful problems with Norton and would
never touch it again. Are you saying I ought to be wary of this?.
I would appreciate any advice on how to set these things.



I wouldn't. You might actually want the bittorrent client
Malwarebytes detected. You might NOT want the default keys set back.
It may have been you who changed them for some reason.


--
Error: Creative signature file missing