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"I am under surveillance by Canadian agents, my computer has been backdoored (nadim.cc)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5194489

"Addendum (added Feb. 10, 1:50PM EST): Iâ(TM)ve decided that the way Iâ(TM)m going to deal with this is by doing disk forensics on my computer and moving on, continuing my life as normal. I am not going to slip into total paranoia because of this incident. I have a history of attempted entrapments, of border interrogations and of surveillance, and with this incident, hereâ(TM)s what Iâ(TM)ll say:

If any agency is continuing to monitor me because of Cryptocat, you are invited to meet me under honest pretenses and have a cup of coffee with me. Just donâ(TM)t lure me in with lies and donâ(TM)t backdoor my computers. Be honest with me and I will have no problem discussing my work with you. I am not a criminal, I am an upstanding citizen. If you want answers, then contact me and be honest about it. You have nothing to fear from me.

In order not to cause unnecessary drama, to protect my privacy and to lessen my stress levels, Iâ(TM)m removing this blog post until further notice and investigation. This attracted way more attention that I wanted it to. I just wanted to protect myself, not cause a media uproar. Thank you everyone for your support. This is already a stressful situation and the huge level of attention to this blog post is just making everything more stressful to deal with."

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=2187386

They foisted curved tabs on thunderbird users some time ago. It's possible to correct it with themes, but as I couldn't find any themes that were basically "default theme but without ugly rounded tabs" and there's no about:config option for it, I had to resort to editing the userchrome.css file - something that I'm now probably going to have to do on all my FF installations too.

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=2110991&postcount=5

Alright now I'm afraid I can't help with your verify problem but I do have one piece of solid advice: get rid of Paragon HFS immediately!

It is a truly shoddy piece of software that as of version 9.0 has a terrible bug that will cause it to destroy HFS+ filesystems. Google "paragon hfs corruption" and you will see many many horror stories from people who just plugged a Mac OS X disk into a Windows machine w/ Paragon HFS and then discovered the entire filesystem was hosed. In my dual-boot win/mac setup I replaced my copy of MacDrive with a trial version of Paragon HFS 9.0 from their website and every single one of the six HFS+ disks I had connected internally were damaged. Disk Utility couldn't do a thing and I had to buy a program called Diskwarrior to even begin to recover data. I ended up losing two disks worth of files anyway.
http://www.mac-help.com/t12137-opened-hfs-drive-win7-paragon-hfs-now-wont-boot.html
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=299306
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1677099
http://www.avforums.com/forums/apple-mac/1509344-hfs-super-block-not-found.html

whew! Anyway the pain I went through after that software very nearly ruined my life was so great, I don't want it to happen to anyone else. According to their own website 9.0 has this awful bug but they fixed it in 9.0.1. Evidently the trial download on the main page is still for version 9.0 and still has the disk destroying bug! Any software company that releases a filesystem driver with this terrible a bug (not to mention the numerous reports of BSODs and other relatively minor problems) clearly has terrible quality assurance and simply can't be trusted.

PDF reader... sandbox...

A Document Format that needs a sandbox. I don't have a sandbox around my text editor, nor my PNG viewer, nor my MP3 player... Tell me again, why do we need our document formats to be little programming languages?

Image formats or even MP3 you mentioned can be a viable transport for malicious code too. If you think it over well enough, even text files can be used to exploit e.g. your text editor's buff overflow vulnerabilities...

Good that you point out that the /. article is misleading.

But you are wrong in naming defensive measures that enhance login security "tarpits".

If I recall right "tarpits" work by tying up resources at the attacking computer.
See here for an actual implementation:
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=16674

The whole thread about Ultrasurf being malware - so you can decide... http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=237184

No joke.
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1514487&postcount=106

Spread the word.

Sure. Have look at this thread : http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=206608. AVG 8.0 makes a mess of it by not looking at the content of the ActiveX registry component. So you have a so called infections. But they are not.

Well the general gist of Linux advocacy under which this article falls certainly are suggesting that we replace Windows with Linux on the desktop. Since it's reasonably rare to wish to add Windows to an existing Linux install and since that is not what these articles are about, how well Windows does it compared to Linux is completely irrelevant. It is most certainly true that sticking with Windows will not increase your risk of losing data, while resizing and installing a Linux partition is a significant risk. An end user that hasn't got much interest in computers will very likely never try a second install of Ubuntu if the first one hoses their existing OS.

In any case have you considered backup can also hose a system? I installed Acronis TrueImage on a computer at one point for a friend and he ran into this error (the post below is not by that friend)

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/archive/index.php/t -96224.html

Loved playing tech support on that one.

I've also seen Norton Ghost trash a system drive trying to back up partitions. Something funky about support for a particular hard drive controller chipset I think. In any case, hoses is hosed.

The fact is there's no excuse for software that deals with user data being so damned finicky. It's 2007 - how long has NTFS been around? How long has ext2 been around? You can never make anything completely idiot proof but the software should be damn near it by now. It's not.

Note that I'm not skewing this in favour of Windows or against Linux. Don't even get me started on how bad the Windows File Manager is, especially when you try to copy across network shares. (Why is there no resume option if a copy fails for instance? Any time I'm copying large data sets I'm still using robocopy - even the sync toy is buggy and crash prone)

Why are we all putting up with this shit?

I guess ZoneAlarm registered customers may be surprised in finding how their own original login page works.

Even if you're not a registered user, just follow the link above and enter fake credentials.

The game becomes spicier if you have auto-completion enabled for that form...

Have fun with those antiphishing toys ;)

Original proof of concept courtesy of Elio, original XSS courtesy of .mario.

Since I've had a few months of uninterrupted happiness on Vista, I do suspect that others' disk corruption complaints are due to something like this, especially when they mention that they are dual booting.

As for drivers, I put in an express card with a dodgy driver and my PC froze. I pulled it out, and it unfroze.

Vista 64bit. Two months: 0 crashes.

or... install Spyware guard, http://www.wilderssecurity.com/spywareguard.html which blocks the spyware, and teach them to use Ad-aware http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/ on a regular basis.

I hardly think a person who uses the word "^&*^tard" (mis.) would be able to read sources, so I see little point citing them.

If you really had credible sources, then you wouldn't have any problem citing them.

Actually, winamp has no Spyware, but, a few plugins has spyware. I even installed the latest version, and no links to AOL, even checked for spyware, none found. Conclusion "Unless you prove me wrong", winamp itself has no spyware.

Definetly, DEFINETLY try all of the above mentioned things first and as directed AND THEN if you *STILL* can't get it off (and are sick of my all caps), THEN:

1)Select one of the following spyware removal discussion boards

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/
http://forums.spywareinfo.com/
http://forums.net-integration.net/
http://www.computercops.biz/forums.html

2)READ THEIR FAQS THOUROUGHLY

3)Create an account and post your story along with supporting documents outlined in their FAQ to their board.

4)Wait patiently and a real life antiscumware security expert will help you.

The people on those forums hate scumware more then anyone and devote their spare time to helping rid the world of it. They have created custom tools to remove almost all kinds of spyware and with your help will diagnose your particular infection and send you the proper tools to get rid of it.

These guys are the best so treat them with respect: do your own spyware scans before you bother them. But I think in your case you are qualified to talk to them now :)

Good luck!