CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

i was visiting a site and a window popped up that said my pc had spyware or sumtin like that.

wat is spyware??? is there anyway to remove it??

Spyware, basically sneaks on to your system and tracks what you do online and in most cases sells the info to companies or someone with money. Now, there are different variations of Spyware, but it's not a good thing and can harm your system.

Spybot is great for removing these pests.


O'yeah, most of those pops-up like that one, are just ads to get your attention, you can just ignore them.

I hate it...it's a privacy breach,

umm, they didn't breach any privacy laws. you visit the site, you see the ad. like a banner on the front door of a building. when you enter, you see the banner. what can you do about it? nothing, you can't just take it down you know.

if you mean by privacy that they know what's in your computer, LOL! they don't. it looks like they do, but really is just some script that assumes it knows your details. but it doesn't.

Download the Google toolbar or get Mozilla if you want to stop popups. You should definately never install "spyware removing" apps that are advertised in popups.

djnoz wrote:Download the Google toolbar or get Mozilla if you want to stop popups. You should definately never install "spyware removing" apps that are advertised in popups.

Agreed! That's a really common scam that usually gets you MORE spyware, not less.

It really depends on the spyware as to how much info they see...

What is commonly called "spyware" is really a less dangerous form of Trojan horse... They range from just annoying, to potentially revealing a bit too much of yourself...

The worst spyware programs are Xupiter and Bonzi Buddy... They do all sorts of things, including change your settings (such as changing your home page and search page) load up ads (that you can't always block, and even if you can the sheer number they load will grind your system to a hault) and track your internet usage... They DO really track you, many of them, and besides that, are often responsible for crashing systems... They cause a lot of instability...

The sad thing is some of them (such as C-Dilla) are given with legitamate well known software... (c-dilla monitors your optical drive's usage to catch people pirating the software that uses it...) but most (like bonzi) come with less important bits of shareware as a means of those people getting money even though they're not selling their product... They are often VERY hard to uninstall, and some of them have very virus-like qualities...

To block pop-ups, I do two things:

Since sometimes pop-ups are legitamate, it has to be smart, so there is one pop-up blocker that you have to "train" called analog-x POW which I quite enjoy... Some crafty annoyers get around that by adding random numbers and letters to keep you from blocking (requiring you use wildcards, not too hard to learn) or worse, short circuiting the thing using wildcards in the beginning of the window name "***Attention: Free Spam here***"

In addition to that, I also put certain really nasty (by that I don't mean pornographic, but that applies too) sites in my "restricted" section in Internet Explorer... Ever since I did that, my problem with ambush websites has dramatically decreased... I put tripod in there, and a few "search/gambling/trip to batswana" sites... You know, the ones that register themselves as things like "www.rpgsarecool.com" or "toendallwars.com" (the latter made me mad... Argyll films lost their domain name, and an ambush site took over in a very short time...)

Those things suck... So, those two methods are good... For restricted sites, tell them NO ACTIVE X, and no metarefresh and no accessing secondary sites... Basically, no to everything (unless no means more permission, then tell that yes) and it really helps out...

For real trojan horses (and also for viruses) I use http://housecall.trendmicro.com/housecall/start_corp.asp which is free and it cleans them too! It's really nice, and doesn't become a drain on resources like a resident virus scan does.

Thank you!!!!

Let me add to this whole mess...

1) I think Volt was talking about Spyware/Adware being made illegal, not the pop-ups themselves.

2) Get rid of IE... bottom line. It's the biggest source of headaches and security holes. I've threatened my sister that I won't help her any more with problems if she doesn't get rid of it. Microsoft's Embrace-and-expand approch to web standards and things like ActiveX are a big part of the problem.

3) Spybot won't catch everything... best results are Spybot, AdAware, and AVG (and you'll still have things sneak in, esp if you use IE).

4) Get rid of IE

5) Quick trips to http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/ will give you a quick check for parasites (spyware/adware), as well as a good on-stop place for parasite info (unfortunately I don't think you can search his list).

6) Get rid of IE (did I say this already?)

Some of this stuff is really nasty, the software is un-stable, many times it can load new programs without your concent, it wastes bandwidth (though not much), sometimes it will steal personal information, etc.

BTW - if you do get rid of IE, be aware that many programs (such as WinAMP) which have web page support use the IE web renderer DLLs for the web page (I also found that programs like Yahoo Messenger use it, which is why I have a bunch of cookies in my Temporary Internet Files directory).

BTW... did I ever mention to you guys you all should get rid of IE?

PHIL

P.S. - I'm still a little miffed from Sunday night when I spent the time I would have been chatting with some friends trying to help my sister find and rid her system of software that was generating pop-ups even when the computer was just started up and the browser wasn't even loaded.

Let me add to this whole mess...

1) I think Volt was talking about Spyware/Adware being made illegal, not the pop-ups themselves.

2) Get rid of IE... bottom line. It's the biggest source of headaches and security holes. I've threatened my sister that I won't help her any more with problems if she doesn't get rid of it. Microsoft's Embrace-and-expand approch to web standards and things like ActiveX are a big part of the problem.

3) Spybot won't catch everything... best results are Spybot, AdAware, and AVG (and you'll still have things sneak in, esp if you use IE).

4) Get rid of IE

5) Quick trips to http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/ will give you a quick check for parasites (spyware/adware), as well as a good on-stop place for parasite info (unfortunately I don't think you can search his list).

6) Get rid of IE (did I say this already?)

Some of this stuff is really nasty, the software is un-stable, many times it can load new programs without your concent, it wastes bandwidth (though not much), sometimes it will steal personal information, etc.

BTW - if you do get rid of IE, be aware that many programs (such as WinAMP) which have web page support use the IE web renderer DLLs for the web page (I also found that programs like Yahoo Messenger use it, which is why I have a bunch of cookies in my Temporary Internet Files directory).

BTW... did I ever mention to you guys you all should get rid of IE?

PHIL

P.S. - I'm still a little miffed from Sunday night when I spent the time I would have been chatting with some friends trying to help my sister find and rid her system of software that was generating pop-ups even when the computer was just started up and the browser wasn't even loaded.

Zone Alarm completely screws up the way yo

inkhana wrote:Hmm, must've been something about your settings. I run Zone Alarm constantly and never have a problem logging in...

Ditto. I use the free version, btw. But I have had connection errors only with this site on several computers with varying software installations. I did a trace route multiple times and have found it to be at exactly one server where it starts to time out afterwards.

OT, You can always replace your Network Neighbourhood icon with one of those neighbourhood watch looking things. They're supposed to deter crime in neighbourhoods, but why not on computers? Erm.

MOT, I only use Ad-aware and AVG. I might consider trying out spybot though.

I don't have any firewalls set up. The university network has a lot of things set up to block nasties. The only danger is being hacked by another student... not likely to happen. I don't have any spyware-removing stuff on my PC either, because I don't install spyware, and I use Mozilla, which is pretty much never targeted as a spyware medium.

Thank You!!!!!!!

wait....... wats IE?

IE= Internet Exploder... er Explorer. It's the default web browser on PCs. Even though it's a little off topic, I've ripped spyware of dozens of machines, and they are always, always, always, always, always, always, always on IE systems. Unless you did something like clicked on an email message from Microsoft saying it was a "Complete Security Update." That was a nasty one.

BTW: Have you noticed that nearly all the computer nerds recommend staying away from IE? That's weird. Usually you can't get a group of us to agree on anything. Even some of the non-computer-nerds say to stay away from it. Fascinating.

cool im thinking about switching webbrowsers and im leaning towards Mozilla ^_^

[edit] is Mozilla anygood?

awwwww man PROLBLEM.......ITS DONE LOADING BUT WHEN I CLICK ON IT IT SAYS THAT
mozilla is not a valid WIN32 application

what did i do wrong?

i done get mozilla !!!! whoo whooO! it rocks!

DOWN WITH IE!!!

kenshin1278 wrote:i done get mozilla !!!! whoo whooO! it rocks!

DOWN WITH IE!!!

<-- mozilla

i love mozilla, i havent gotten a pop up ad in like a month. the only problem i have with it though, is that sometimes it dont display stuff right, like an iframe or something like that, but i'm sure they will fix that. it's still the best browser there is i think.

I use only Mozilla and Nestcape.
IE sucks real bad

Netscape is terrible. Ugh.

I use IE. . .guess that leaves me out in the cold here, but the messageboard I moderate *only* fully supports IE, as do some other sites I go to.

I haven't used another browser since I finally left my beloved communicator and went to IE... It's hard for me to switch things like that... I only did because of compatibility issues that I really needed IE for...

> but the messageboard I moderate *only* fully supports IE,

Not that it makes any difference practically, but it's my personal policy that I won't use sites that force me to only use one browser. That's not what HTML was created for.

I'm there with Shooby.... in fact the owner of said site will usuallly get a nasty-gram from me.

Most sites that force IE are ones that use ActiveX. There are only two reasons for using ActiveX

1) too lazy to program the same thing in Java or Javascript

2) the author is doing something that should't be done over the web.

(actually, I think there might be a third, but I'll not elaborate).

PHIL

i'll still use IE. can't be bothered... lazy... agh!

oh wait, i DO use mozilla when my computer is in Linux mode. well, that's an exception then.

For some reason I can't get Firebird to execute in Linux, which is a nuisance... forcing me to use that awful "konqueror" thing instead.