Differences between version 4 and predecessor to the previous major change of SpyWare.
Other diffs: Previous Revision, Previous Author, or view the Annotated Edit History
| Newer page: | version 4 | Last edited on Tuesday, September 30, 2003 8:24:32 am | by CraigBox | Revert |
| Older page: | version 2 | Last edited on Monday, September 29, 2003 8:48:24 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
@@ -15,13 +15,13 @@
* !HotBar (claims to provide: IE toolbar. Really provides: ads. Use instead: [Google toolbar|http://toolbar.google.com].)
* New.net (claims to provide: new [TLD]s like .cool, .cars, .boats etc. Really provides: you guessed it, ads. Use instead: common sense! A reputable company will get a name on the real Internet.)
* Incredimail. It makes gratuitive use of html email to put animated gifs and embedded sound into emails, but it rarely looks the same at the recipient's end, and the [EULA] claims to give them the right to anything you write using it, sending messages back to them (via [SMTP]).
-There is also a category of "real" software that "phones home" in ways that perhaps it shouldn't. RealPlayer and WindowsMediaPlayer are two great examples of this. You can turn it off if you dig through the config enough.
+There is also a category of "real" software that "phones home" in ways that perhaps it shouldn't. RealPlayer and WindowsMediaPlayer are two great examples of this. You can turn it off if you dig through the config enough. If you use the "pagerank" feature of Google's toolbar, it will report every URL you visit back to Google. Officially it's required behaviour for Google to tell you what the pagerank is; unofficially that's a vast amount of information and it's not clear what else Google uses it for. Most people trust them, because they have a history of not being evil
.
BonziBuddy and most other software of this type can be removed by [Ad-aware|http://www.lavasoftusa.com]. In some cases the Spyware will try to remove Ad-aware first, and/or prevent lavasoft's download site from resolving so you might have to download it via an uninfected computer. (If this was the case it wouldn't be spyware but a virus)
A number of other Spyware-removers are available, however most of these are also Spyware themselves. For best results you are advised to use the following two Spyware-removers [Ad-aware|http://www.lavasoftusa.com], and [SpyBot - search&destroy|http://www.safer-networking.org/]. The reason for using these two are that they are both updateable over the Internet, and that one finds programs the other doesn't and vice versa.
-Even on a clean install of [Windows] many spyware removal tools will detect a spyware program called Arkeia
, which is a part of windows but
can be safely destroyed.
+Even on a clean install of [Windows] many spyware removal tools will detect a spyware program called Alexia
, which is a web cookie that Microsoft puts in the default install, and checks/updates every time you use windowsupdate. It
can be safely destroyed.
''Spyware will make your [Windows] installation unstable or destroy it all together. Fun.''
