.. I think we could all stand to tone down the rhetoric.
Full Disclosure: I am a Mac user, and a very happy Minion user.
Originally Posted by downset
you are right, a program that pops up a warning that it has an invalid certificate and wants unrestricted access is no problem at all
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The reason warnings like this exist is to give you the opportunity to make a choice about what is happening to this system. It lets you know, when you might not have known otherwise, that something is being installed to your computer. Without this warning, your favorite **** site or gold-selling site could drop anything it wants (say, a keylogger to get your WoW credentials / online banking login / etc.) onto your computer without your knowledge.
But it is exactly that: a warning. It may as well say "Did you know you were installing Minion?" Since you did, in fact, know that, and mean to do that, you can say yes. If it said "Did you know you were installing RandomTrojan?" you could say no. If you say "no" to every warning that ever pops up, you could never do much of anything to your computer.
I'm not a user of jupdater, but after looking at it bit I don't think it's a fair analogy. There are many java programs that you can just drop on the desktop/dock and run.. but Minion has a lot of system-specific configuration work to do. This is why it's not just a drag-n-drop.
Shirik (who happens to be the primary author) has already explained that since this is a cross-platform installer, it has to request the minimum permissions for all its supported platforms. Since one of those platforms is Windows, and the required permissions for that platform is All, that's what is requested.
On the invalid certificate issue.. there are TONS of reasons why a certificate could be invalid, up to and including greed on the part of the certificate issuer. I once had a 3-screen argument with Firefox because it didn't want me to use a certificate registered for www.<trusteddomain>.com being served by www2.<trusteddomain>.com. The best plan is just to look at the certificate and see if you can intuit that it means well. In this particular case, it may be related to the fact it is Beta software - for testing purposes by hardy users only - and therefore a signed certificate hasn't been purchased yet. If that makes you uncomfortable then - while I can assure you there is nothing wrong here - your best plan may to be to wait for the official release.
Edit: the shortened form of "****ography" is filtered on this site. Who knew?