spyware sux.

i dont know about yall, but its become waay out of hand. imean i had to reinstall everything cus i was infected with a spyware worm. it was called lop. luckily, i was able to keep my mp3,s and my porn. but all my other shit was gone. o well. my system runs 100% better now. but still. it should be illegal to instal spyware on oyur computer withought you knowing. i think this clearly falls into ( the invasion of privacy ) part. i know they dont collect information, but their just nagging.

also, pow works good for popups.

analogx.com(sp?)

the only difference between spyware and a virus is YOU let the spyware in on one of the shitty programs you've been downloading. Oh and reinstalling everything is lame, because there's software out there specificly designed to remove spyware and their ilk.

*cough*

*sigh*

Virii are teh suck, no?

best day of my life was when I got adaware.

Epyo said:

best day of my life was when I got adaware.

Yes, Adaware works very well for me as well. :D

What the heck do you guys do that you need adaware?

Technically, you're given knowledge of the spyware prior to installation, though nobody ever bothers to read it. It's all there in the TOS and stuff, so, it's "legal", for now anyway.

Opulent said:

What the heck do you guys do that you need adaware?

DivX codec, Kazaa, Dope Wars shareware...

On a side note, how do I turn off these fucking messenger adverts that keep popping up under XP?

For one, nowhere in the US Constitution, and probably not in many other nations' constitutions', is there any protection of privacy. One just assumes that it comes with the capitalistic right to property, I guess, and it's a right that everyone assumes they have. No, privacy is something that you must secure for yourself.

Second, Ad Aware is great, but Spybot Search & Destroy can eliminate adware/spyware modules from host programs, replacing them with dummies, still allowing the host program to work, so you can keep your Kazaa shit, whereas Ad Aware just targets programs that are exclusively spy/adware. Spybot also supposedly has more signatures listed in its signature file. Like Ad Aware, it is free for personal use.

Adaware rules. If that doesn't work, throw a MOAB on spywarecompany's.

pritch said:

On a side note, how do I turn off these fucking messenger adverts that keep popping up under XP?

Here.

Use adaware and 'spybot - search and destroy' and you should be problem free.

Grazza said:

Here.

I tried that already, their method failed to unregister an OCX entry and XP aborted the uninstall.

only problem with adaware it takes fucking forever for a update

well i tried everything. seems it got rid of the adware that i didnt care about. it didnt get rid of lop. aparently it is a worm and it dasables all your anti virus protection. it sucked. there was no way ( for me ) to fix it. accept reinstall.

Heh, I wonder how much Spyware I have on my computer at this point

Over Christmas break, I ran Adaware on my family's comp as part of the whole while-I'm-home maintainence. The results showed about four hundred ad progs on a three-year-old machine.

Now, Adaware is part of my monthly hard drive cleanup. Virus scan -> Adaware -> Scandisk -> Defrag for happy healthy harddrive. :D

I run Adaware after every single program installation on my computer to make sure there's no covert shit going on in there. And I run it fairly regularly just as a habit of computer maintenance.

It's a fantastic little proggy.

IMJack: Now try Spybot and see what AdAware missed. :P I use both just incase neither gets everything, which can be the case.

exactly
i tried both and it still didnt get rid of all the spyware, especially lop.