NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, April 2003
Spies
From On Computers by Bob Schwabach
March 2003, Week 1, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
http://www.oncomp.com
Suggested printing by Paul Zurr, NWA-PCUG
Printed with permission
bobschwab@oncomp.com (click to email author)


NWA-PCUG 04/2003 NewsLetter Article 18861 N. Hwy 112, Springdale, AR 72762-9303

We ran "SpyBot" on our PC and found lots of "spies." These are left by some programs you've installed and web sites you've visited.

Software spies are designed to track your computer usage and report back to the source that installed them. You don't know they were installed of course; nobody asked you first. Their presence may be innocuous (most are harmless) but by tracking your usage they can also report back to their masters and put you on more mailing lists for more internet junk mail, which we all call spam. The harmless ones just notify you of updates. The two leading programs for detecting spyware are AdAware and SpyBot.

AdAware found one piece of spyware on my main system, SpyBot found 81. Quite a difference. Both programs are free for downloading. AdAware can be found at www.lavasoft.nu http://www.lavasoft.nu; SpyBot can be downloaded from http://beam.to/spybotsd.

The domain designation "nu," by the way, stands for the tiny island country of Niue, population around 1,800, near New Zealand. The "to" in SpyBot's web address stands for the much larger Kingdom of Tonga, also in the Pacific. In a kind of curious aside to that, I once had dinner with the King of Tonga, who told me how to remove grease spots from my jacket using French bread. Said he learned it at Sandhurst. Nice guy.

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