Whats this spyware I keep hearing about?

[Animal]

Originally posted by Albromor: I went to Lavasoft and downloaded Adaware for free, ran it, and it discovered 187 suspicious items in my files! It cleaned out everything safely. Get it!

Adaware is great! Adware Plus! is even better as it can run in the background and stop spyware before it's even installed.
As a side note some programs, ie Kazaa will not run with the spyware uninstalled. Check out Kazaa Lite. http://www.kazaalite.com/

[DraconisRex]

Yeah. That's why you never take anything "free." When I built this computer, I installed the O/S, the games and the drivers. I firewalled the network, which reports a false IP address. I don't load anything. I check via ctl-alt-del every few weeks. I trust NOTHING and won't download it. I have all cookies set to expire when I log-off my browser.

Because, in the past, I didn't. On my last computer, I ran Adaware and unloaded nearly 1000 files and programs. It was gross.

[Animal]

Originally posted by DraconisRex: Yeah. That's why you never take anything "free." When I built this computer, I installed the O/S, the games and the drivers. I firewalled the network, which reports a false IP address. I don't load anything. I check via ctl-alt-del every few weeks. I trust NOTHING and won't download it. I have all cookies set to expire when I log-off my browser. Because, in the past, I didn't. On my last computer, I ran Adaware and unloaded nearly 1000 files and programs. It was gross.

Nearly 1000 files and programs! I'm hoping that most of those were cookies. That's just crazy. By the way some spyware won't be stopped be a firewall as it rides piggy back on another app. I'm running Norton Firewall 2002 and a NAT Router on my network and it doesn't make a diff with some, they'll just hitch a ride on IE Explorer or the app that they installed with.

[Ronn_Bman]

One thing to keep in mind with ad-aware is the it will tell you about programs that "may" be spyware.

iMesh is the only thing I use that activates a warning. It uses a program called Cydoor which, according to a link provided by the site, is not spyware. It doesn't track anything you do, but it does put up advertisements occasionally. It a free service, so I don't mind, but the trick is that ad aware detects it as spyware. If you remove it iMesh doesn't work anymore and you have to reinstall, but once you reinstall, ad aware will detect cydoor again and you continue the cycle.

The simple answer is to use ad aware's function of ignoring certain files.

I uninstalled iMesh, ran adaware removing all recommended files, and then reinstalled iMesh and ran adaware again. This time I knew all the files were related to iMesh, so I chose to ignore them. They never show up again. Now I can run adaware to my heart's content without screwing up iMesh.

You may not use iMesh, but you may have a similar program this will work with. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Megabot]

The best thing is not to use KaZaa instead use Limeware that dont have this nasty "spyware" [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[Larry_OHF]

spychecker.com is suppposed to be able to detect and remove spyware before it finds a home on your PC, so you do not have to delete it with adaware. I do not yet have it, as I only learned of it today. It supposedly filters and catches spy crap as it is transferring. If anyone has it...I would be interested to learn more before I get it.

[Blade]

Well just d/led it myself, only problem is i had to reinstall my mouse driver other than that it didn't seem to do any harm, except to thoes darn gator files.

[B_part]

Use WinMX instead of kazaa or imesh or whatever u are using.
I don't know how it might work with slow speed connections, but is certainly spyware-free (lavasoft ad-aware dixit)