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TFA doesn't explain this very well. Couldn't find an antivirus page about it, but here's another page mentioning the tool.

I keep 3rd party cookies blocked... that keeps everything nice and clean.

For the layman, the way these tracking cookies work is when you're visiting site A, site A has a banner from site Z. If you have 3rd party cookies enabled, not only can site A set a cookie to your harddrive, so can site Z. Now, you go to site B which also uses site Z's ads... and site Z can see you were also at site A. Block 3rd party cookies however, and you cant get a cookie from site Z unless you actually VISIT site Z.

Disabling 3rd party cookies lets you keep their useful functions (login information at ebay, etc) and restrict the illegitimate ones (tracking my useage).

Mike Healan from Spywareinfo.com has a good article about cookies and their spyware-esque function here: http://www.spywareinfo.net/july20,2005#cookies

The future of advertising

Your home - In the near future

You are awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of the radio. You roll over and slap the alarm but the sound continues. You realize that it is coming from across the room and, instead of music, it is actually an advertisement for an enlargement pill. You stagger across the room and find a tape recorder glued to your wall.

As you turn off the tape recorder, you notice that a poster has been hung on the wall advertising a low-interest credit card. While staring in amazement at this poster, you hear another tape recorder blare to life out in the hallway.

You walk into the hallway to find this new racket. Switching on the light you discover posters hung every few feet on the walls, all advertising different products or services. In between each poster is a tape recorder. You turn off the tape recorder making the noise and another springs to life in the kitchen.

Swearing, you storm into the kitchen to find the same pattern of posters and tape recorders and even a flashing neon light attached to your window. As you turn off the tape recorder in the kitchen (and another starts up on the opposite side of the room), you notice that someone has pried open your back door.

Frightened now, you rush to the telephone to call the police. You pick up the telephone and dial 911. You put the receiver to your ear to speak to an officer, but instead you hear "Thank you for calling the all-night adult intimate chat line. Your phone bill will be charged at a rate of $500 per minute". You try again with the same results. You try 0 for the operator and 411 for information and its the same thing no matter who you call.

Horrified, you rush into the garage past a tape recorder asking if you are fat and a blinking neon sign declaring you to be today's winner. As you approach your car, you see that it has been spray painted with the address of a child porn web site.

You drive to the police station listening to an actor on the radio explain how you too can become a millionaire is just three weeks. You can't turn off the radio and the same thing is on every station.

You explain the situation to the police and they follow you to your home. You show them the crowbar used to bust open your back door. You show them the posters super glued to your wall. You point to the tape recorders scattered across the house.

The policemen take a few notes, then begin to leave. Confused, you ask them where they are going and they say "Sorry buddy, but there's nothing we can do here."

"What do you mean?" you ask. "Look at my house! Someone broke in and glued advertisements all over my walls."

"I see that. Unfortunately sir, no crime has been committed here."

"What do you mean no crime has been committed!? Look at this mess!"

"Yes sir, I see that. Unfortunately our government has decided not to make this sort of thing illegal. Instead, they have asked the advertising industry to regulate themselves and to follow 'Best Practices'".

"Best Practices?? What the hell does that mean? How can this possibly be legal??"

***

Internet advertising companies are out of control. The story above is fiction, but only in that I substituted a home in the place of a computer. What happened to the unfortunate individual in that story is exactly what is happening to countless millions of people every day when they turn on their home computers.

The Federal Trade Commission wants the industry to regulate itself. Will the people who distribute the coolwebsearch trojan voluntarily regulate themselves? I think not. To do what I described above to your home is illegal. Why should it be legal to do the exact same thing to your computer?

Pardon me for plagarizing myself:

Some time ago, I posted to a message board topic where some idiot was arguing that people shouldn't worry about their privacy if they have nothing to hide. It was an angry post because I can't stand it when someone says that. It is an ignorant and simpleminded argument to bring into a debate about privacy.

Most people have nothing to hide and they would still require a search warrant before allowing the police to search their home. Wanting privacy to be respected has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you have something to hide.

I decided to start a topic on this at SpywareInfo's forums to see how other people deal with that argument. The topic has been going strong for several months.

The latest response was a really interesting one and I've decided to show it here:

"When someone gives you the old "I have nothing to hide" argument, what do you usually say in return?"

When I hear this my blood boils, I feel my hackles rise and I want to reach through my monitor and inflict serious bodily harm upon their sheepish, emasculated, brainwashed arses!

Then, after I have calmed down, I patiently explain to them how such a statement is based upon empty rhetoric and not logic. I explain to them that in order for people to be truly free and enjoy the so called democratic rights our protective politicians claim we have, people must feel free. They must feel free of suspicion and they must feel a sense of trust, that people must be respected and not to be watched over their shoulder all the time. That society advances by the unfettered actions of truly free people, not those huddled in a corner, fearfully grasping their meager material possessions to their chests and calling the police to hunt down any person that displays the least bit of individuality. Creativity and progress come from those that are free of fear and distrust. But then I just sigh and walk away, knowing that the true spirit of humanity is actually lost to the vast majority of people on this dismal planet.

It turns out that some of those who say they don't worry about their privacy because they have nothing to hide sometimes are lying. When these people's privacy is invaded unfairly, they squawk just as loudly as anyone else. Read this story at the Willamette Week Online and you'll see what I mean.

Also note that the DVD writer software and everything _is_ included in the price.

So is the Macs.

A more exact comparison would be a 2 GHz Celeron machine with el-cheapo SDR RAM. That's still faster than the G4, but not as overkill as the P4.

Completely false. The G4 in the iMac is a far superior chip to the Celeron, and is on par with the P4 in some respects and much better in others,/a>

Plus, the iMac has the same type of RAM, its not SDRAM. You should read more closely.

Tax software also comes with the Mac, and there is no difference between the Pro and Home computer's OS - its identical because Mac OS X is completely scalable for anyone's individual needs.

Plus the Mac has 2 FireWire, 3 USB 2.0, TV out as well, MUCH smaller footprint, is silent, higher-quality audio input and output, PLENTY of games available (I already linked to a crapload of games in another post, so I won't bother here - you're obvioulsy stuck in 1996), iLife software built in (Please - tell me what's equiavalent to GarageBand for PCs - and is free with any new PC).

And when did I say that all PCs were cheaper? Never. I was more taking a shot at Element for their highly overpriced PCs that should be much cheaper because they DON'T pay the MS Tax.

Also note that it involves _no_ assembling stuff on your own.

This should go without saying.

Macs also come WITHOUT spyware, which I would consider worth a ton of money. And without the ability to get the horrendous viruses that plague Windows. See, even though the hardware may seem overpriced to you, the SOFTWARE is what REALLY differentiates Macs, you PC people can't seem to realize that. My time is worth so much more than having to spend it reinstalling Windows every 6 months due to the fact its performance degrades exponentially over time without any sort of user intervention, having to religiously update Virus definitions, fret over e-mail attachments, rebuilding the whole system every time a virus takes it down.

Again, it seems you saved a few bucks, but your personal time is absolutely worthless. Sorry to hear that.

Agreed

Agreed on point 1, but then Belkin is a very popular product.

As for point 2, you would be surprised. When someone exploits that flaw, the number of people that become infected is staggering.

Tweakxp.com was taken down a couple of months ago because someone did this. The attacker's web host pulled their account and replaced the content of the page with a link to a page at tweakxp that explained how to handle the HOSTS file. TweakXP's server couldn't handle all that traffic.

Read this for the whole story of that.

Nearly the same thing happened to me recently. My site was mentioned in a newsletter that was forwarded to spamcop in a complaint. Spamcop notified the owner of my web host's data center that my site was "spamvertised" and it nearly got me shut down.

What's really cute is that the spam complaint was bullshit anyway. It's an opt-in newsletter written by a very well known technology writer and it has a confirmation process. This was no spam, yet some dumbass reported it as spam and spamcop blindly accepted it. So much for their claim to be "the most accurate spam blocking service".

Lovely. This from the same asshat company that sent a threatening letter to the Mozilla Phoenix project because they were under the mistaken impression they own the word "phoenix" and tried to include an adware module in their Award BIOS. Why am I not the least bit surprised?

Send that same letter to every manufacturer of PCs on Earth. Pheonix doesn't sell to you, they sell to them. Pheonix could give a shit if you don't like it. All that matters is that PC makers buy it. Send the letters where they'll matter most.

If those PC makers receive enough letters to make them worry about their bottom line, hopefully they will either 1.) offer PCs without this shit, or 2.) never ever remove the option to disable it.

Gateway already doesn't like all this anti-copy, consumer hostile bullshit. Remember their "Rip, Burn, Respect" ad campaign? So at least one company does remember the concept of making the customer happy.

The newsletter is http://www.spywareinfo.net. The site itself is http://www.spywareinfo.com.

You said, "Any organization that rolled-out Mozilla widescale obviously did it out of zeal and not from reading the release notes..."

This would be a more acceptable view in a more perfect world. However, in my opinion, organizations don't have any better choice than an imperfect Mozilla. Internet Explorer has limited features (no tabbing, for example), and many unpatched security holes. Opera is spendy, and doesn't offer HTML email formatting.

Internet page display technology is very, very imperfect. CSS doesn't have all the text formatting features, for example, so that users are required to provide their own system for some features.

Netscape is not an option for governments and large organizations that must be completely open. Netscape just lost a court case over a sneaky element of the browser, in which a user's activity was tracked by AOL. See Wired News: Netscape Settles Software Issue. Would you trust them again?

Moz isn't perfect. It crashes with too much activity. When it crashes, all instances crash. But Moz is the best of a VERY imperfect lot.