Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Spyware Programs

Along those same lines root kits are used by worms. There's currently one (probably more) circulating on AIM. Here's the link to the /. article. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/31/0120251&tid=220&tid=215 From there you can click the link in the summary to go to the full article. Root kits are pretty nasty and its disturbing that BMG would be using them.

Okay, I'm really surprised by you guys. I would have thought the members of this board would be all over Sony like a pack of rabid wolves. Surely I'm not the only one who finds this treatment of their customer base completely reprehensible. Sony's feeble capitulation yesterday and the distribution of the "patch" not only misses the point, IMHO, it sends a strong signal that they have every intention of continuing to use and develop these types of DRM systems.

Thoughts, anyone?

I'd say we'd all better get used to the content that we have, or get used to paying for it every time we want to watch it. Unless we're careful and stop letting companies get away with this.

I too, have had a similar experience. With ONE excpetion, I have found that XP with SP2, combined with NAV and Ad-Aware and maybe Spybot S&D takes care of all spyware and viruses (of course, making sure that every product has all the latest updates), but I too had one PC where, no matter what I tried, the spyware (or whatever it was) could not be eliminated.

Thanks for the info.

Check out some of my favorite tools:
http://www.answersthatwork.com/
http://www.ghisler.com/
(Total Commander)
http://www.winguides.com/tweak/
(Tweak manager)
http://www.ccleaner.com/

We have had very good success here with the Microsoft AntiSpyware beta product. This is a product of a company (Giant) that was bought by MS recently. The Monolith hasn't managed to screw it up yet. The combo of Symantec Antivirus Corporate and MS AntiSpyware has kept us spyware free for quite awhile. It did a good job cleaning up systems when we first deployed the product as well. People around here have learned to be careful with their browsing habits because we will blow away and reimage machines with
persistent/unsolvable spyware problems. That is a risk you take in allowing complete, unmonitored, unrestricted internet access.

The Mac Mini on my office desk often points and laughs at the PCs under my desk whenever a new anti-virus signature file or anti-spyware update, or MS patch rolls in.

Same with my Slackware boxes. How the IT industry ever got neck deep into Microsquish is beyond me. 10 years in the industry and I meet maybe 2 in 10 folks who really like the MS solution. I guess I shouldn't have taken this job with a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider/Gold Partner, huh?

To reply to my own reply, I can see it will be very hard to dig out of this hole. There are simply too many people invested in MS-centric products. We use Shavlik to automate the patch process so we don't have to spend so much time keeping up on security holes and bugfixes. And it costs money. Symantec AV Corporate costs money. Everybody has a finger in the pie. Meanwhile our linux servers have an average continuous uptimes of over 2 years. The king of uptime hasn't been rebooted since we moved into our new office over 3 years ago. On the other hand, just today I had to stay after hours and reboot ALL of our Windows servers to finish installing patches.

I will second, triple and quadruple the recommendations by others to start using Firefox and STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER. It is the worse piece of crap browser out there. I seriously believe Microsoft leaves their browser the way it is because they get payoffs by spamming companies to leave it that way.

Firefox is a superior browser in everyway when it comes to security and stopping spam. With Firefox I use Lavasoft Ad-Aware and Spybot. I think these are all you need. I almost never get spam or popups of any kind. I also have the Norton Suite which has extra protection against popups and can even disable flash ads.

If you are cleaning your system out, I recommend Ad-Aware and Spybot and start using Firefox immediately. Also download Webroot SpySweeper. It is an excellent spyware program better than the others I listed, but it has a subscription fee. However, it has a 15 day full access trial. Use it a couple times during its trial to get your computer clean and you may not ever need it again.

Conveinent links:

Firefox
Lavasoft Ad-Aware
Spybot
Webroot Spysweeper