Sunday, July 10, 2005

Evil, Evil, Evil Computer Ad Ware

I'm in the middle of trying to get ready to go on the three week trip to Washington. Time is always short and the number of ducks to get in a row always high. This year we are having B.W. house-sit for us. And, I know that one of the things he's interested in was working at the house--writing up research and such on our computer.

So, a couple of days ago I went to some website or other and downloaded a very persistent set of adware, and that kept generating awful popups! Because we have a porn/violence block program running, and it's set to require the user to reboot if too many blocked sites are visited, the computer would need to be restarted every 20 minutes or so.

What was more maddening was:
1. These popups would happen even when I wasn't the internet, and
2. They would continue even after I had scanned using AdAware and Popup Search and Destroy.

So, I finally went to Smart Computing and tried to search for answers (by the way $17 for an annual on-line subscription is a huge bargin).

So, that took me to the Spy Ware Warrior site. Man, what a lifesaver. . .and in my opinion a wonderful example of how the web should be. I was able to find out exactly how to purge our home computer of the crap.

I was amazed at how terrible the spy ware "industry" has become.
If you are as naive about it as I am. . . I encourage you to go visit and try to educate yourseslf.

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