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Enjoy!

-FB

All that crap is probably adware/spyware. Try downloading Ad-Aware and see what it turns up. You will be suprised at what you find...

after installing divx..

I installed the Dix codec the other day and found I had Gator installed on my laptop. I had installed only Visual Studio, Office, email, and other well known applications on a clean XP install. I was surprised to find Gator. This makes think it was the Divx codec that installed Gator like I suspected.

I went to Lava Soft to get ad aware. I removed Gator no problem. Also check, if you're using Windows, msconfig to see what is starting.

Download and install the full-featured, adware-equipped divx codec. Then, run Adaware to find and remove all the Gator and other adware that is part of the divx package. All the divx with none of the crap!

• AVG AntiVirus
• ZoneAlarm and
• Ad-aware

Adaware http://www.lavasoftusa.com/

Just use KazaaLite. And then run Ad-Aware to remove Gator and all the other evil spyware and crap Kazaa installs. Plus, KazaaLite makes you a super user. Supposedly that has benefits...

As Kazaa comes bundled with multiple spyware programs this also gives you an idea of how many computers are infected with its programs, mind boggling really

remember Kazaa is just a vehicle for this software as their revenue model is based on the user installing it, i feel sorry for all the support desks that are going to have to deal with all the problems it brings and the security implications when someone/thing exploits it, imagine how many corporate systems are infected and the implications that could bring for security in the workplace now that other private companies have direct access to their data bypassing firewalls etc (by using http port 80 to communicate) i mean Windows isnt exactly the most secure system around but these applications have made this so much worse and it can only be a matter of time until someone develops a *nix port of spyware.

The sooner they are out of buisness the better for the user, but these numbers prove that it isnt going to happen unless virus companies decide to pull their fingers out and target these applications which are probably more destructive and intrusive than most viruses.

According to the virus scanner companies stance , if you release a worm,virus etc with an EULA you are exempt from detection and are free to extract any information you like from the users/hosts system for financial gain
(regardless of what laws exist to protect the users data in his/her country)

luckily a few good people have addressed this problem but as their software isn't as widely known as the big boys (Symantec,Mcafee,Sophos etc) and doesn't come bundled as standard by pc manufacters (as a lot of virus protection does) i fear this situation can only get worse until the users computer becomes an un-usable device

First off I don't take advice from some newspaper flunky. Second it never ceases to amaze me just how freaking stupid a lot of people are when it comes to computers.

They get spyware because they don't read freaking license agreements or EULA's, or get it because they are too dumb to tighten up browser security so your browser (often Internet Explorer) WONT auto download and install it for you like a good little bitch. If people would actually use software like Proxomitron and JD5000 (Add-in for Proxomitron), then you would not have problems with drive by spyware or other HTML/Java/Javascript/Exploits/Nasties while browsing the web. It's called UNIVERSEL WEB FILTER for a reason!!!.

Not to mention of course the biggest things like ACTUALLY VIRUS SCANNING everything that comes into your computer and doing system maintenance by de-fragmenting your hard drive or even getting something like Norton Utils 2002 or later to keep the system, registry, and hard drive(s) maintained properly.

Just this week I talked to two people I see online often in IRC. One was stupid enough to have 330 ITEMS OF SPYWARE detected in Ad-Aware and another is too dumb to actually tighten up his mIRC settings to avoid automatically downloading IRC viruses/worms.

I'm sorry but I have no sympathy for morons who can't keep virus scanners updated and virus scan everything that comes into the computer, cant keep up to date with software like AD-Aware 6 and Spybot: Search and Destroy, or actually uses Internet Explorer or other browsers with default settings on a windows box and wonders why the hell crap like Xupiter and viruses get through the holes in their browser(s).

And if you follow the "steps" laid out by that lame assed newspaper article, it's a big mess of crap for nothing when if you actually have a freaking clue how everything works on your computer (both software and hardware) then you will VERY RARELY if EVER need to re-install. I laugh at thee who re-installs a OS every 3 months or every year because of their stupidity. Sell your computer if you are too dumb to do the most basic of steps. *Rolls eyes*

If you know what you're doing (as in, not the type of thing that should be posted in an article for novices, although he did include a warning) doing a clean install can have a *much* greater performance advantage in windows--including windows xp. Heck, from what I observed with my computer, I'd do it every 3 months...although every 6 months is good enough for most heavy users and every year should be good enough for the rest of the population.

The trick is knowing what you want to backup, and making absolutely sure that you have it in places that you'd normally back up anyway. If possible, keep all data files in a separate partition so you can just format the one where windows and the installed programs are. I'd never back up the windows directory (that's where most of the trash that I want to get rid of is), but I changed the outlook directory to "E:\My Documents\mail" (yes, I changed the my documents directory to the "data" partition as well). If you don't have a separate partition, keep a checklist of every directory that you need to backup, and save everything that you would want to backup to those directories.

The only good time to reinstall the OS is if there is something wrong with it.

Not really, sometimes there's something wrong with your system and the best way to truly fix it is by doing the clean install thing. Try running adaware and see how much spyware is installed. Then there are viruses...I've never had problems with them, but a friend of mine recently ran a scan and found 9 viruses in his computer, and his only detectable symptom was the computer would lock up often.

Basically, what I'm trying to say with all this is that, if you're careful, you can safely do clean installs without risking the loss of any data at all, and the benefits are much greater than "reorganizing and defragging". And to those who will undoubtly respond...yes, I know, I've never had the need to do frequent clean installs with my linux partition either.

One final advice for all you novices who are going to take the risk and do this for the first time. Don't follow these instructions:

For god's sake...don't force your cdrom open when the computer is off. Just turn it on and plop the cd in there first thing, while in the bios screen :)

At one stage Ad-aware removed the new.net file without correctly uninstalling it (thus breaking your network connection).

New.net is one of the dodgiest companies out there - their site suggests that they sell legitimate domain names - unfortunately they don't sell domain names in real TLDs. Their dodgy bit of software makes domain names with non-real TLDs (which they sell) work.

It sounds like you may have a spyware that monitors keywords in IE (Microsoft made it easy to do, programs can attach themselves to IE windows and see what the browser is doing).

Try AdAware, and switch to Opera, it's even faster than IE with less security exploits. As for ad-filtering proxy-server (assuming you're in Windows, try Proxomitron. :)

Right. It is probably spyware. Try downloading Ad-Aware. It will make your computer boot faster too.

Antivirus software just cannot detect it.
That's because you gave permission to install it via some sneaky click-wrap license. You know, those ones you never read? AV companies have the technology, but they would probably get their pants sued off if they called another company's product malicious when it was merely annoying or nosy--and when the user supposedly consented to it being there.

The wintel world (win9x) needs something that can get Gator and friends out the door.
There are plenty of them already, like Pest Patrol, Spybot S&D, and Ad Aware.

There's a lot of good information on spyware at Doxdesk and Spyware Info.

The wintel world has something that can get Gator and friends out the door - AdAware from Lavasoft.

You forgot the obligitory link to Adaware for all 10 people who do not know about it yet. :)

You can use LeechFTP for FTP resuming. I think it supports HTTP downloads too.

There are *lots* of free zip utilities. (Personally I think WinRAR is much better and worth the money).

For an alternative to RealPlayer...hmmm. You got me there :)

WindowBlinds makes it clear that it is a demo, so complaints about it expiring are just lame. The LiteStep devs are working on skinning, and I think I saw a WindowBlinds FX clone recently (try Shell Extension city).

Its possible to find lots of freeware for Windows, you just have to look harder. Look at GNUWin II for some open source apps.

And make sure to download Ad-Aware to hunt down those evil spy programs.

It seems to me that, if you are using Windows XP and a hardware firewall, it is better to use the ZoneAlarm software firewall. Then you can run VisualZone, and quickly see whether anything has gotten through your hardware firewall. Don't worry about ZoneAlarm's RAM use. RAM is cheap.

ZoneAlarm works well with Windows XP. It is necessary to disable Microsoft's firewall, of course; you don't want the wolf to guard the henhouse. (See the section Windows XP connects to Microsoft's computers in at least 17 ways. in the article, Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going..)

A lot of us need to run programs that don't have Linux or BSD versions. For us, Microsoft has an absolute monopoly. It's hopeless being involved in adversarial behavior with Microsoft. The company has $40 billion cash in the bank. I have ... (Looks in billfold... Moth flies out.)

One way to cope with the situation is to use two computers connected to one keyboard, mouse and monitor. Run Mozilla on Linux on a computer that is connected to the Internet. Disable internet access on the other computer running Windows XP by removing the TCP/IP protocol. Use another protocol, such as NETBEUI, for file sharing. (IOGear seems to make the best KVM switch. My experience has been that there is no video degradation with IOGear KVMs.)

My experience, and the experience of others, is that Windows XP doesn't crash, it just becomes less usable. Windows XP becomes shaky when enough programs are loaded that all of the installed memory is in use. There are other situations where Windows XP begins malfunctioning, but these are not well characterized. (Can anyone help me here?) The symptoms of the malfunction are slowness to respond to the keyboard, and disk thrashing caused by virtual memory use that sometimes takes 45 seconds or more.

The consensus seems to be, however, that Windows XP is Microsoft's best OS. The only other candidate is Windows 2000. Any comments?

The single biggest cause of instability in a system that was once stable is bad connections. Just open up the case, pull out all connectors and adapter cards a few millimeters, and push them back. That cleans the contacts.

(Download ZoneAlarm FREE for personal use.)

Ad-Aware is excellent for use with Windows XP. It gives a list of all running processes, who made the software, and where it is located on the hard drive. It's main purpose is to check for spyware. (Virus program software does not check for spyware, so you need a separate program.)

In Portland, Oregon, USA, the best Internet connection is Hevanet DSL with a Cisco 675 router from the phone company, Qwest. The Cisco 675 can be put into mode in which it is a true hardware firewall, not just a NAT device. (My only connection with Hevanet is as a satisfied customer.)

Subject says it all. Get it here.

Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam. It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened. "This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.

I seriously doubt that this guy has some new revolutionary technology that will allow him to force ads to pop up no matter what we are doing. This sounds like the typical spyware that comes with kazaa and other similar programs. There is a great cure for this: Ad-Aware. This could also be the IE bug that was mentioned on slashdot yesterday.

Whatever this guy is talking about, it can be easily defeated by ad-aware, using mozilla, or disabling activex in IE.

http://www.lavasoftusa.com works too.

Try http://www.lavasoftusa.com/ instead. I'd have to agree on the spyware detectors though, run your favorite after any software installs that you don't trust implicitly. And that's all of 'em expect for those you coded yourself, right? I also run it once a month or so in case anything slipped through the net.

This is more than "a bit of a scam" -- it's immoral and undoubtedly illegal. There are ways to get defeat all their little scams and still use the Fasttrack P2P network. You can try Kazaa Lite, which is Kazaa without the spy/scumware. I'd also recommend using AdAware, a great little program that scans your registry, memory, and hard drives for spy/scum/adware components and gives you the option to delete them.

Using AdAware to delete cydoor.dll will likely leave your P2P client not working. That's where the dummy cydoor.dll comes in. It allows the client to start without providing any of the unwanted cydoor functionality.

For more info on spyware and scumware in general, check out the quite wonderful Counterexploitation site...

Hope this helps...

Now everybody go and scrub up for dinner. This is a horrible thing for a company to do but I'm sure they'll do anything they can to make a buck.

How do you know they didn't put another "home-made" spyware into Kazaa Lite?

The deal is this - "real" Kazaa has spyware. Remove spyware and Kazaa refuses to run/work. Kazaa Lite is a hacked Kazaa that uses an empty file instead of the Spyware DLL Kazaa uses. When you install Kazaa Lite it tells you to let a particular file slip past Ad-Aware, as Ad-Aware will think it is a spyware file but really it's an empty useless file (pop it into Notepad to verify).

If Kazaa Lite "pulled a Gator" and just replaced Kazaa's spyware with its own then Ad-Aware would catch it. Is it possible that Kazaa Lite could just replace the spyware DLL with its own? Yeah, it's possible, and if that possibility scares you off then file sharing is not for you.

I've never tried Kazaa, but try Ad-Aware by LavaSoft to clean up the spyware. It's always worked well for me on software like Bearshare.

I've found Ad-Aware to be a great tool for pulling out all kinds of spyware, including Double-Click's and other's cookies.

Actually, Ad-Aware does a pretty good job of rooting out all the trash Gator, Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursor leave behind when you uninstall them. In the "deep scan" mode it even manages to root out all the crap they leave in the registry. I recently installed it on my roomie's Windoze box and the first time I ran it it removed some 200 registry keys and (IIRC) 116 dlls that various crapware she had loaded on her machine over the years had left behind. Her box went from damn near unusable to fairly stable (for a Windows Box) in about an hour.

I let my nephew use my sole remaining Windows machine a few weeks ago while he was over for the weekend. I went downstairs to use it and low and behold every web page I went to previously now was barraged by pop-up and pop-under ads.

Sure, I was at first amazed that I could lower my mortgage rates, increase my sexual hunger, and check out hot teen action, but then I realized that I wasn't even browsing pRon sites, and I was still getting that sort of sheer amount of ads.

Digging a little further into it and after checking out the history on the userid I had created for him I found that the nephew likes pRon, and lots of it. He also apparently deemed it necesary to install a bunch of shady software off the net while using my computer, particularly Kazaa.

I proceeded to remove any and all software that wasn't there before he used the computer. After rebooting, low and behold the pop-up ads were still popping up like zits on a teenager's face, marring my desktop with their ugly little existence. Now was the time for definite action, no time to hessitate.

After searching about a bit I recalled Ad-Aware and promptly downloaded and installed it. After running a full scan with this software and rebooting, there was no more pop-up ads. Sure, I may not be able to lower my mortgage rate anymore, but at least I'm not annoyed by 5 pop-up ads every time I open slashdot's homepage.

As for my nephew, he'll no longer be using any of my computers anymore. His taste in pRon was just plain horrid anyways. Not even one good free site did he find.

The catch-22 is recognised and we explain to customers that the problem is in the PC and they need to access the info via a working machine. And while "We do not support or officially recommend" ad-aware we let them know it may fix them up and keep them clean.

Everyone is sue-happy, we gotta cover our butts. In an ideal world, "Layered Service Providers" and "Internet Explorer Helpers" would be easily disabled.

Yet another reason to use Ad-aware.

If you want to check your system for spyware get yourself a copy of Ad-aware. Its great.

AdAware (USA Link)

AdAware (.de)

It's called AdAware, and it seems capable of nuking most nasty little apps installed by websites and applications like Kazza. Grab it here from Lavesoft USA and be very afraid at how many spyware components it finds!

You should also download their reference file update utility too. This lets you keep up to date with the latest spyware programs out there.

.. I use this brilliant software called Ad-aware to keep my system free of spyware programs.

I know people have experienced problems with Gnutella clients in the past but Limewire has improved dramatically over the past few months. If your willing to spend $8.50 you can get the pro version which has no bundled software and has a few additional features. You can always use the free version and run Ad Aware to get rid of the additional apps. Limewire is open source too so you can compile it yourself and remove the additional apps plus it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The 2.3 version has a bunch of new features including the ability to search by media type: audio, video, programs, etc.

I can't say enough good things about AdAware, I have recommeneded it or installed it on all of my friends machines (who for all intents and purposes I support). NEarly every "average" user has installed something that came with spyware. Some people noticed marked improvements in their systems speed after having 20-30 spyware aps removed. AdAware is developed by Lava Soft.
-OZ

Now I dont know if it's a joke or not, but still after installing Kazaa and most other p2p programs, warning lights in Ad-Aware(2) from Lavasoft lights up like a xmas tree.
Bearshare is the only one I can manage to install and get rid of all the snooping, I think.

BDE (Brilliant Digital's Engine) is listed separately on the list of programs installed and may be deinstalled. It leaves some very suspicious crap around in the %WINDIR%\SYSTEM32 directory, so after deinstalling and rebooting it is a good idea to remove this as well before continuing (and before you connect to the network).

Regrettably the Gnucleus network still doesn't provide the accessibility to material that Fast-track does. I run both clients and can see the difference, particularly with regards to queuing.

BDE (Brilliant Digital's Engine) is listed separately on the list of programs installed and may be deinstalled. It leaves some very suspicious crap around in the %WINDIR%\SYSTEM32 directory, so after deinstalling and rebooting it is a good idea to remove this as well before continuing (and before you connect to the network).

Regrettably the Gnucleus network still doesn't provide the accessibility to material that Fast-track does. I run both clients and can see the difference, particularly with regards to queuing.

GiFT also looks promising, but it's unlikely to catch on any time soon.

It's worth noting that the new reference list for Lavasoft's Ad-Aware identifies this.

goto http://www.Lavasoft.com and download ad-aware and the latest ref update and have it remove all your spyware from your computer..

So Kazaa, the premeir FastTrack client, begun to bundle spyware.

Great, I can deal. I switch to Grokster.

Grokster begins to bundle spyware.

Fuck. Switch to Morpheus.

Morpheus bails from FastTrack, and switches to Gnutella.

Fuck again. Switch back to Grokster, use AdAware.

See that Morpheus, who explicitly claimed that it contained "No Spyware of Any Kind" engage in this type of practice?

I can only laugh at the pitiful wreck that the company/corporation-based P2P programs have become.

Erm...if that's coming up, you may want to get Ad Aware from Lavasoft. It may have been bundled with some other software you've installed. Don't know of any examples offhand that has it, never run into it yet tho.

If you are going to use Windows software from untrusted (i.e. most everyone, especially M$) sources you must take steps to protect yourself. First, trust your gut. Does the developer "smell funny"? Is the software from a startup company with no visible means of revenue? I tend to trust programs created by individuals or small teams that demonstrate some passion for what they do (EAC, or LAME for example)

Then, get Technological on their ass. Start with a personal firewall that monitors all outgoing traffic. Zone Alarm is the one I trust - gut feelings, and I've read some negative things about Black ICE. Amaze and astound your friends as you block requests from RealPlayer, Windows Update, and other "legitimate" programs that like to access the net without asking permission.

Then get Ad Aware and get that sinking feeling as you see the total number of unauthorized programs, components, and services on your system.

Finally, install Proxomitron to make make your browser behave a bit more politely by re-writing the html it sees before it sees it (and find yet another reason to love Shonen Knife. They're way kawaii!)

Forewarned and fore-armed (hairy ones, even), you stand a much better chance of maintaining control of your system.

Ad-Aware is what you're describing. This software rocks, by the way. Highly recommended.

Dude, I hate to tell you this, but Slashdot doesn't use pop up ads (or pop unders, either). Chances are, you have one of those Gator programs that pop's up ads for you. Strongly suggest you download Ad-Aware to get rid of the intruding virus.

Anyone else think Norton Et-Al should get on the ball and add these to their signatures? They could even make it as part of an alternative signature file for you to download that includes traditional viruses *and* spyware / adware.

Or for the more lazy... You can download Adaware from their main site here (but it's temporarily down) or get it from cnet.com here. This will scrub your computer of spyware you have now on it. I would periodically use it as well.

While browsing I would probably use a blocker in addition to your firewall. Maybe something like Spyblocker which will block malicious bugs, cookies, ads, spyware, and worms. This can be downloaded here.

That should keep your computer covered.