People with ‘puter problems
p2pnet.net News:- “People are getting really angry. They’re angry at Dell and Microsoft and their cable providers, and that’s appropriate. They should be.”
That’s a quote from Forrester Research’s Ted Schadler in.Joseph Menn’s LA Times Column One, slugged, No More Internet for Them.
So what’s the problem?
Spam. Pop-ups. Spyware. Adware.
Menn quotes Stephen Seemayer, who apparently had the first Pong video game system on his block, as saying he’s so brassed off that he’s un-plugged his computer.
Seemayer’s machine got so jammed with spam that he stopped checking e-mail, says the column, going on:
“When he surfed the Web, pop-up ads from a piece of spyware he couldn’t wipe out spewed sexually explicit images and used so much computing power that the PC would just stop.”
Seemayer said he could be sitting in the living room reading a book when he’d hear his son scream, “It froze up on me again!” So when his son left for college in September, Seemayer finally unplugged.
“For many, spyware was the last straw. During the last 18 months, the sneaky programs have soared to the top of the list of tech woes, triggering the most tech support calls to Dell Inc., the nation’s top PC maker,” says Column One.
“Spyware lurks on as many as 80% of computers nationwide, according to the National Cyber Security Alliance, a trade group.”
Menn’s piece is replete with tales of woe recounted by people with ‘puter problems.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t mention SpyBot Search & Destroy, a free app guaranteed to solve many of their pop-up, spyware and adware difficulties at the least.
Spam, of course, is another story.
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See:-
jammed with spam – No More Internet for Them, LA Times, January 14, 2005
January 15th, 2005 at 4:55 am
Can you blame them???????
January 15th, 2005 at 8:16 am
This guy claims to be so computer l337, yet he doesn’t know about either Ad-Aware or SpyBot-Search and Destroy? It sounds mighty strange to me..
January 15th, 2005 at 4:11 pm
Microsoft’s faulty design of Windows is to blame in two obvious ways:
1. Users can’t tell what’s being installed on their systems. They get to click one “Ok” button (if they’re lucky), then it’s up to the app itself to tell them the gist of what it’s doing installing dozens or hundreds of components into Windows. Afterward, it’s impossible to tell what app was responsible for installing any given component, or what that compoment actually does. Is it a vital Windows component, spyware, or a piece of harmless unnecessary junk? Who know?
2. Users can’t tell what’s running on their systems, or what their system is actually doing. Only the most technically-savvy can get a complete list of what’s running, and only painstaking research and expert tools can figure out what those running programs and “services” are supposed to be doing and what they’re actually doing. Users can’t even see intensive internet activity happening on their computers unless they have an external hardware modem with lights.
These design faults could be easily fixed if Microsoft cared. But why should they with a 95% market share?
January 15th, 2005 at 11:17 pm
let me get this straight … you want a cheap computer that runs a cheap operating system, and you get upset because thats what you get. sorry guys, can’t feel too bad for you. There are other O/S’s to choose from. In America, money talks, you don’t like it, buy something else and stop your whining!
January 16th, 2005 at 8:54 am
Here is the best solution to your spyware problems. Ditch Internet Explorer and get Mozilla Firefox browser. I haven’t had one piece of spyware since I started using it period. Internet Explorer is dead as far as I am concerned, and firefox smokes Internet Explorer on page loads.
Go to http://www.mozilla.org and get Firefox.
Newo
January 17th, 2005 at 3:14 am
That’s fine as long as you don’t buy anything or try to do any online banking involving secure active X controls. I use Firefox for most of my browsing, but try as I might, some websites just won’t work unless you are using IE. You are better of with something like Spybot and a decent firewall– in addition to to using Firefox.
It’s only a matter of time before someone figures out how to exploit Firefox too. 10 years of IE vs 1 year of Firefox, it’s only natural that more flaws have been found in IE.
January 17th, 2005 at 4:02 am
The irony is that it is the most expensive operating systems and application software that are most vulnerable.
You live in a different America than most I guess, where people believe they need to use a specific brand name in order to be “compatible” with their peers. The fact that specific companies are deliberately incompatible with everyone else isn’t considered reason enough to reject that company from consideration. We would never buy a car that only ran on specific brands of roads, and specific brands of gas, and yet people blindly do this with software.
Want to join the Free/Libre market where money talks? Start with your office suite and email packages and regardless of your operating system use OpenOffice.org and the growing Mozilla.org Internet suite. Once you use these then you will be in a better position to have a choice on your operating system.
BTW: Yes, I’m a Free/Libre Software user and commercial support person. With MacOS-X being based on Free/Libre Darwin operating system, there really is just Microsoft and “Everyone else” except for a few niche players.
Russell McOrmond — http://www.flora.ca/
January 17th, 2005 at 4:08 am
Sorry, but there is no such thing as a “secure active X control”. The whole concept of client-side scripting is insecure in that you are running software from a largely unknown source.
While it is possible to use only signed code from well known sources, most people are not software experts and don’t know when it is safe to authorize the installation of software and when not to. They don’t even recognize these ActiveX, Java and other such client-side scripting as being “installing software”, and just by having such a feature are more vulnerable.
I do not run any Microsoft software or operating systems on any of my computers, so obviously don’t use Microsoft Active X. Any site which requires ActiveX is a site that I’m not interested in browsing to, and any service that they offer is simply not worth the security risk to my computer.
Russell McOrmond — http://www.flora.ca/
January 17th, 2005 at 6:56 am
Amen. I am using Microsoft OS but i do not use Internet Explorer for anything except getting updates from Microsoft to patch the never ending holes in their crapy software. If there was another OS that could run every peice of software that I use then yes I would definatly switch. When I’m using Mozilla FireFox and I come across a web site that only allows Internet Explorer I simply say screw it. I think that if a web site is designed for only a certain type of browser then it is simply a sign of poor design and is not worth me visiting it. I have seen a significant drop in the amount of spy-ware that gets into my computer since I started using FireFox, an occasional 2 or 3 every once in a while compared to the 10 to 20 a day when I was using IE. I’m never switching back to IE.
January 18th, 2005 at 10:18 pm
One guy writes that he never gets spyware/adware with the Great Firefox, another writes he only gets 2-3 pieces of spyware with the same Great Firefox. Meanwhile, using IE myself, with MS OS software properly configured, I’ve never installed spyware. The only reason I can see for that, is that I actually read what comes up on my screen. If you don’t pay attention to what’s going on around you then things will probably happen that you don’t notice.
Works for damn near everything in life.
January 19th, 2005 at 8:10 pm
umm… its called a pop-up blocker (google has a nice one) and SP2… oh, and stop visiting all those porn sites to save yourself most of the spyware trouble