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01/26/2004 Entry: "Stop the Spyware and Adware!"

Well, it finally happened to me. I was invaded by obscene adware and spyware from CommonName, Bargain Buddy, IEPlugin, IESearchBar, Blazefind, and 180Solutions - that I know about. These nasty programs are referred to as "Parasites" in the computing world. They spy on you and sell the information to the highest bidder, put up pop-up ads in your face, and take over your start-up homepage to put whatever swill their advertising customers will pay them to shove in your face. I'm not sure how it happened - I was searching for a utility to configure an Apple Extreme Base Station to dial-up from a wireless laptop, and I was besieged. Fortunately I identified it immediately and went to work scraping the turds off the bottom of my foot, laptop style. For what I wasn't able to scrape off I used some tools to compensate:

SpyBot cleaned out the offending code, though it requires a reboot since all the evil services startup at boot and can't be killed any other way.

SpyWare Blaster prevents the net.turds from installing themselves on your computer in the first place.

Worthy of note: Because some of these companies fantasize about being legitimate businesses, they include "uninstall" features. I helped a coworker net.delouse his system by running their "uninstallers". They're tricky, and ask you about uninstalling using double negatives so they can try to trick you into NOT uninstalling. They didn't fool me, though. He had several really nasty ones that put unwanted menu bars and advertising popups in his face while he tried to work, and took over part of his Internet Exploder toolbar. We still had to delete a few folders in the C:\Common Files directory which share with legitimate applications on the system so it can't be entirely deleted, but at least we were able to purge the system. What a goat-rope. What's funny is that he's had these net.lice since I started there, over six months ago.

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