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Given Up to Spyware?
Khuffie writes "Wired has an interesting article about how some people have given up to spyware, knowing that the software they're installing virtually takes over their internet connection. What's even more ironic is that they claim it's a necessary evil for free software, when things like the Google Toolbar virtually replace Gator, and there are many spyware-free P2P programs available."
The link in the summary is incorrect, the story is at http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65906, 00.html.
This comment was thought up very late at night and does not necessarily reflect my views at a more reasonable hour.
Spybot
Adaware
Oh, and Linux.
People just don't care... they can't be bothered to think about it. I've talked to so many people, "yeah.. I need to get a new computer, this one's slow" their system gets hosed, they just get a new computer. wtf is with that?
The cost of the privacy lost is invisible and (apparently) non-intrusive, while the cost of the time and effort is obvious and immediately quantifiable.
Think about how many times you've heard someone say things along these lines: "Can you believe I spent 6 hours cleaning spyware off my system and had to reinstall Windows twice? Then I had to find new software with a privacy policy acceptible to me, and it took hours to download and install it all."
Compare that to how many times you've heard someone say something like: "Wow! I had spyware all over my system. It was tracking my shopping and browsing habits, reporting my computer usage stats to ad agencies, and sending my IP and passwords to a scam company in Russia!"
The cost former is obvious to even the most ignorant users, while the cost of the latter requires much more insight and knowledge.
open ports one at a time.....
just having a 1 port router will keep most of the fresh install vulnerabilities off line to the net, and allow you to get what you need.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Zonealarm and Norton (the AV part at least) both have very little to do with spyware detection. I wonder what else you were doing differently?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I just returned from Sierra Leone, likely the poorest country in the world.
A good internet connection is 8kbs and that's when the power hasn't failed or you have petrol for your generator and the phone system delivers a dial tone.
Even so, the 8kbps costs $200 a month in a country where an OK wage for a laborer is $2 a day -- when a job can be had at all.
When time after time I see 30-50 percent of that 8kbs bandwidth wasted by spyware, it really makes me angry.
Spyware hurts entire developing countries.
It's actually worse than you portray-- the worst spyway is not even a minimally legitimate commercial venture-- it is theft, run by international criminals and organized crime. So-called "legitimate" spyware and adware have conditioned people to think that a windows box encrusted with this shyte is normal.
The newest stuff is delivered by a trojan downloader, that also installs a keylogger--or several. The browser hijackers they install do one--or several things--to send you to their fake websites so they can steal your credit card, or even your identity:
-- They take over your HOSTS file so that legitimate urls are translated into THEIR IP addresses, not the real ones.
-- They add THEIR fake banking, paypal, amazon, etc. sites to your "trusted sites" list.
-- They may even change your proxy settings to accomplish or reinforce the same thing.
If you try to clean this crap off with AdAware or Spybot S&D, the trojan downloader--which also disable your AV software and/or Spybot--will NOT detect the trojan downloader, and it will reinstall the malware faster than you can clean it.
Some of these were spread the old fashioned way-- email attachments. Others used the Windows RPC 445/tpc buffer overflow exploit, or the latest IE IFRAME exploit, or one of the 16 other exploits out there for IE alone that MS has not patched.
This shit crossed a line about six months ago from being a commercially-oriented nusiance to being outright theft, run by the same criminals that run phishing scams.
I clean up PCs as a sideline, and the trend is very ominous-- the utility of the PC as a productive tool is threatened, as is the integrity and trust of the Internet.
Thanks, Microsoft. I'd like to see the Dept. of Homeland security take your ass to court for criminal negligence.
---
This is one of my two favorite parts from this article:
Of course the only "supported" way is through Add/Remove Programs, and NOT through the use of Spybot, etc.
And here is the second tidbit (also from the linked article):
Fucking Asshats.
Except all of these people are giving up significantly more than steam asks. I think you're making false analogies.
I personally don't mind the loss of privacy in steam because it means I don't have to worry about lost / scratched media ever again (and I ALWAYS forget to make backups). That alone is worth it to me. Plus, I hate draggin my ass out to the store to buy games.
I compromise my system integrity regularly. When I patch the un-Steamed Unreal Tournament 2004 I don't dissasemble the binaries and make sure it's really not selling my computer's soul. When I go to windowsupdate.com I'm similarly compromising my security. Steam's fine, I don't mind a certain amount of privacy loss at all. But all these actions are no comparison to spyware.
Photos.
http://osswin.sourceforge.net
How about not allowing me to mass-delete the 151,095 messages in my Spam folder? I'm sure as hell not going to manually delete them out of Gmail 100 at a time.
How about keeping messages dating back to September in my Trash folder, and messages dating back to October in my Spam folder, despite clearly stating that "Spam messages more than 30 days old will be automatically deleted" and "Trashed messages more than 30 days old will be automatically deleted?" How about when the combined messages in Spam and Trash are using 906 MB (91%) of my Gmail storage?
There's nothing I can do to purge them, unless I want to click through more than 1,500 pages worth of spam listings, waiting for each page of 100 spams to load, hitting Select All, and selecting Permanently Delete. It's not going to happen, and there's no reason anyone should have to do that. AOL's mail interface is more intuitive than this, for god's sake.
At Yahoo Mail, I can empty the entire Bulk folder permanently with one click and the drive space is immediately credited back to me. Sure, I don't get a gig of storage there, but seeing as how I have control over what does and doesn't get stored, I don't need it. Gmail is unusable to me until there is a way to mass-delete the contents of the Spam folder all at once.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
In the long run it stopped being a problem when the hard drive Symantec's adware was installed on dropped dead.
Nowadays there's a much better virus scanner, very simple to use. For *nix boxes, for example to integrate with your email processing, there is Clam AntiVirus. It's GPLed Free Software, has a great mailing list, its virus database is updated regularly. There is an automated tool called "freshclam" that gets database updates.
I use ClamAV when I download my mbox files from my hosting service. At one point I was getting 400 MB of email a day, almost entirely viruses, and clamav was very simple to use to delete the virus-infected messages, so the combination of legitimate mail and spam was just a couple meg each day.
For scanning your hard drive under Windows, there is a GUI program called ClamWin, based on the clamav engine with the same virus database, and automatic updates. It's a very simple program, with a minimalist user interface. It's very easy to use and effective.
What I can't figure out though, is how to satisfy WinXP SP2's insistence I get a virus checker. It doesn't recognize clamwin as being one. I would imagine all the virus scanner publishers had to pay microsoft for the privilege of being a recommended virus tool. Or maybe it's just that Microsoft doesn't want to admit a Free Software solution is superior to any of the proprietary ones.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Problem solved.
But I digress. A simple google for the name of the app, and 'spyware' often gives you a good clue. If the top results are all "spyware free", like, say, Shareaza, you've got a winner. If, on the other hand, like Kazaa, it returns a page that says "Is KaZaA spyware? Executive Summary: Oh, my! YES!" as the top result, generally you've got a program to avoid.
Amazing how 10 seconds time can save you hours of frustration.
Actually, yahoo doesn't count the bulk folder against your disk space at all (nor the trash).
One that I remember specifically was on guru.com, where the client was asking for a program that would set the, uh, "user's" homepage to a URL to be specified by the client, and then prevent the user from ever changing it to anything else.
You would think the job board staff would forbid such contract offers from ever getting posted, but I'm pretty sure that once someone has paid for a recruiter account at one of the boards, that he can pretty much post anything he wants without ever having to get it reviewed or approved.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I got this warning too (and I'm using Gentoo, heh)
Seems there were sites distributing a spy/malware version of Azureus to people (this includes download.com, shame on them). I hope people wise up.
Just look at this user comment:
"one of the worst bittorent program I ever had. yes, this program can download fast, but it's filled with so many spywares. This program will kill your computer! made my pc ran like turtle and had to reformat it."
Have any of you had this problem? Not me.
It's sad that people would do this with GPL opensource code in an attempt to spread more crap to everyone.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, this is more like cigarettes being good for you and then the local convenience store putting all the arsenic and shit in it as an after-market addon.
The Farewell Tour II
I'll post anon for that...
I've work at a bank for the security/frauds/money laundering department as an external consultant developping applications. Actually, my job had nothing to do with money laundering/frauds per see, I was just dev. support applications for them.
After talking to them many times, and listening around, you begin to realize something: everything we hate on the net is nearly all backed (obviously or covertly) by organized crime.
Internet Casino, Trojans, Spywares/Adwares, Scams, Phishing, etc.
I don't remember how many times they linked spywares companies to organized crime while looking for money laundering, frauds, etc. Often, the spywares companies don't even know they are being used, but they are. Most of the spywares makers are backed by anonymous donors and such, or enter deals with the org. crime fronts. They receive loads of cash to develop a spyware, and just cash in the money without asking.
The scenario is usually this: some young prodigy just finished college in computer science. They are approached by someone(or another company) that is looking to invest in a company that would do spywares. The young chap, seeing the sign of profit, start a company with some friends, and makes like 200k+ the first years out of college. 21-23 years old with that much money is a dream for many people, but it has a price.
I think we need courses about IT ethics and such. With so much plague on the net, it's easy to make quick and big money without thinking about the consequences.
So, now, as an argument, tell your friends: "If you support spywares, you support terror^H^H^H^H^H^H organized crime" (although the former would work better IMHO =)
At Yahoo Mail, the contents of your Bulk Mail folder do not count against your account limit.
Weatherbug ITSELF is not spyware. But, for the longest time, Weatherbug came with Gator aka Claria upon install. I think being bundled with spyware is just as bad as being spyware. At this point, Weatherbug also defined itself as "Adware" on its site, because they gave you random popups. Type "spyware weatherbug" into any search engine, and you'll get an actual history instead of Weatherbug's site, which tends to leave things out. I have a sneaking suspicion that Weatherbug only got rid of the spyware in response to the bad publicity it has gotten lately.
We Mac and *nix users should worry about this.
Well maybe that is why my OS X notifies me by default whenever a program is running for the first time (even upgrades) and asks me if I really want to run it.
Secondly, if I am actually installing something it will require an admin password even if I'm logged in as admin.
These things make it more noticiable if any malware programs attempt installation and these are default security features of Jaguar (I don't even have Panther yet).
Sure I could click yes and blindly put my password in, but it's not going to do anything invisibly in the background. This is why (at least with OS X) does not have problems with spyware (and lesser market share).
But hell... If people are just going to buy a new computer everytime they have spyware they might as well just put forth the extra bucks and get a mac.
rtfm
/home as readonly.
Kiosk mode was added somewhere in KDE 3x , support for it has been improving, although the best way to make a REAL kiosk is to mount
Second, reporting back isn't the only issue with spyware. There's also pop-up ads, which just calls IE with a URL, and redirecting internet pages, as a proxy. A hell of a lot of report back software installs as part of IE, and thus if your firewall will let IE, it will let the spyware out.
I'll admit all those are less likely under Firefox use, but nothing stops spyware from firing up a hidden IE instance to report back while you happily use Firefox.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
There's a great article at Arstechnica entitled Malware: what it is and how to prevent it . Good read, if not a little on the basic side. However, it did suggest a great anti-spyware app called SpywareBlaster which is seems effective at preventing spyware in the first place..
;^)
That, couple with the Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy, and I've had no problems whatsoever.
P.S. And it helps if you don't visit porn sites and download wares too
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