CleanMyPC

[Morrile]

Hello,

It seems MacPaws version of a notorious registry cleaner by the same name is now been deemed as a PUP.  Is this an error or is MacPaws version truly a unwanted program?

I have attached a screenshot of this product with the same name as known PUP.

Regards,

Morrile

 

[Unicore]

Registry cleaners cause much more harm than good and should not be used.  Therefore, it is a PUP.

[Firefox]

Have a read through this tread...

 

[Telos]

@Morrile Malware protection has become political. It's big brother telling you what is good and what is bad. Quite sad. You may expect that driver updaters will be next to fall, followed by torrent downloaders (O yes son, you might catch a nasty cold torrenting). 

[Unicore]

18 hours ago, Telos said:

@Morrile Malware protection has become political. It's big brother telling you what is good and what is bad. Quite sad. You may expect that driver updaters will be next to fall, followed by torrent downloaders (O yes son, you might catch a nasty cold torrenting). 

Not at all true.  MBAM gives you several options concerning PUPs.  You can use the recommended setting or if you prefer to allow malware onto your computer you may also set MBAM so that PUPs are ignored or have MBAM give you a warning.  You are in control of your computer, and MBAM gives you a variety of options.  It defaults to the recommended setting because the overwhelming majority of users prefer not to have PUPs unscrupulously and without their knowledge downloaded to their computers in the background.

[Telos]

5 hours ago, Unicore said:

MBAM gives you several options concerning PUPs

Declaring that registry cleaners are PUPs goes beyond subjective. Some may be, but not because they are registry cleaners. Turning off PUPs detections drops protection from real PUPs as well as imagined PUPs.

Misclassifying software due to personal bias is an integrity issue. Let PUPs be PUPs.

If you don't like reg cleaners, driver updaters, torrenting apps, then don't install them. But don't make that choice for others.

[Liquid]

On 23/05/2017 at 9:28 AM, Telos said:

@Morrile Malware protection has become political. It's big brother telling you what is good and what is bad. Quite sad. You may expect that driver updaters will be next to fall, followed by torrent downloaders (O yes son, you might catch a nasty cold torrenting). 

 

1 hour ago, Telos said:

Declaring that registry cleaners are PUPs goes beyond subjective. Some may be, but not because they are registry cleaners. Turning off PUPs detections drops protection from real PUPs as well as imagined PUPs.

Misclassifying software due to personal bias is an integrity issue. Let PUPs be PUPs.

If you don't like reg cleaners, driver updaters, torrenting apps, then don't install them. But don't make that choice for others.

I don't think it's political or a big brother tactic. it's actually the opposite. If you read the thread Firefox linked to (above) you'll see that MBam are letting the people decide what should or shouldn't be considered a potentially unwanted program. It's only classifying certain software as "potentially" unwanted. Not as malware. And although some reg cleaners have a good reputation, there are a many more that would be considered "definitely" unwanted, by users, if they knew what was really going on behind the reg cleaning, optimizing facade.

And from what I can see,  it's not targeting all reg cleaners, only those which have a poor reputation. I have CCleaner installed and it passes the PUP detection unscathed. But if it were to be flagged as a PUP, I would just add it to the exclusions - since I know I want to keep it.

To me, this is far better than having a more forgiving PUP detection, which may actually let bundled garbage pass through undetected.

[Morrile]

Hello All,

Many thanks for the suggestions yet I have set an exception for this app as I have used the Mac version for many years, so I do trust the company. The PC version was garbage when it first came out yet it's improved over time. I use it more not for cleaning the registry but to clean cookie, tmp files and such like. 

What made me enquire is that CCleaner is never blocked by Malwarebytes, so I wondered why.

Many thanks again,

Morrile

[exile360]

3 minutes ago, Morrile said:

The PC version was garbage when it first came out yet it's improved over time. I use it more not for cleaning the registry but to clean cookie, tmp files and such like. 

It's possible that this was the reason it was added as PUP since it's from the same vendor and has similar functions.  If that caused a lot of users to request that it be listed as PUP then that would likely be the reason we flag it as such.

[AdvancedSetup]

All registry cleaners are PUP (Potentially Unwanted Programs) or should be classified as such in my opinion.

 

A few recommended articles to read on registry cleaners:

Registry cleaners are not supported by Microsoft

Microsoft cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the use of a registry cleaning utility can be solved. Issues caused by these utilities may not be repairable and lost data may not be recoverable

 

• Microsoft support policy for the use of registry cleaning utilities
• An often posted and quoted article, Ed Bott's Why I don't use registry cleaners
• Older article quoting two MVPS's, but relevant still is Do I need a Registry Cleaner?
• miekiemoes' Blog Registry Cleaners and System Tweaking Tools
• Registry cleaner - From Wikipedia
• Are Registry Cleaners Safe to Use?

In most cases regardless of which Registry Cleaning tool you use it's not going to outright break Windows from booting or running. Normally the damage done is rarely seen or even attributed to the cleaning. How it can sometimes manifest itself is with an application simply not behaving as it used to, a program feature that no longer launches. In some cases on a computer with detailed auditing enabled it can show errors that were not there prior to the cleaning, but again these are typically things that would be nearly impossible to know after the fact what caused it.

Bottom line is WHY are you cleaning the Registry? The system can typically read through the entire Registry in under a minute, but that is not how software reads, writes to the Registry. It makes a specific call to a location where it expects its configuration to be or where it needs to possibly interface with other COM objects to complete an operation and can typically make that read in milliseconds. Reading all the keys for my HKCU hive took 249 ms with a total of 21047 keys. So how is removing a dozen or a few dozen going to really help speed up my computer?

If you can show proof positive 100% that some value in the Registry is actually causing an issue then change or remove THAT entry. Not hundreds or dozens of entries because someone that has been programming for a few years now somehow feels they or their team know the Billions of possible values and every single one that is good or bad and can automate fixing it. Sorry but I call BS, no one knows every single entry and what it means let alone if its good or bad.

 

While you're reading about Registry Cleaners you might also want to read the following article

The complexity of finding, preventing, and cleanup from malware

 

Edited May 30, 2017 by AdvancedSetup