February 18, 2005
The war goes on
It seems these days that the internet is used for a lot more bad than good these days. The RIAA and the MPAA would like you to believe that it's you, but I think the much bigger problem these days are spammers and Spyware creators.
As the House is preparing the Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act (SPY ACT), spyware authors are getting more sophisticated by creating a new breed of spyware that is difficult to detect and even more difficult to remove.
Like how Spam is illegal yet people get dumped with Spam like crazy every day, i doubt that this SPY ACT will do much good to thwart people are out there maliciously creating these programs.
The fight against spam has gone pro-active in that infrastucture changes are being made, and sophisticated spam detection devices are stopping spam before it hits people's mailboxes.
Adware and Spyware protection on the other hand has largely been passive. Wait until you get hit, then try and get rid of it using common tools like Spybot or Adaware. This new breed of spyware called, kernel rootkits is designed specifically to go around this hole.
So again I urge you to consider joining the 250 million downloaders in using Firefox or if you're at all techinally savvy try moving to linux. Or at least please stop clicking OK whenever a box pops up and tells you to.
Posted by Bryant at February 18, 2005 03:43 PM