Build Date: Tue Oct 22 17:50:15 2024 UTC
I DON'T. Buy the tomatoes with. The stems. On them. They don't. Degrade. They go. Down the sink. And into the WATER. Then. They get lodged in the throats of little. OTTERS.
-- Christopher Walken
Get Rid of Spyware
2001-10-19 03:13:23
Spyware is the new and mostly unknown evil that silently installs itself on your computer, then tracks your every move and reports it to a central database where your personal information is sold to the highest bidder. It is amazing how quickly spyware has become almost de rigueur for most Windows computers these days and sadly most people don't even know they installed this horrible crap on their system.
Not only does spyware live up to its name in reporting your actions to its creator, but virtually every software install package that includes some spyware makes little or no effort to inform the user that it will be adding some surreptitious and in my option rather malevolent applications to your system.
If you use a Windows or a Mac PC and you've installed any applications that you've gotten over the net in the past six months, especially those Napster P2P replacement, no matter how careful you were during the installation process, you're probably infected with some spyware.
Fortunately, if you value your privacy and dislike such dishonest business practices, there is something you can do about it. They are several spyware removal products that do an excellent job in tracking down and removing of whatever version of spyware you have installed.
The one I just used and can recommend is Ad-aware by Lavasoft. I'm usually very careful during software installs, but sometimes, well, you know how it is, you have a beer or two or six or ten and the next thing you know, you're hacking under the influence. Then you're surfing a site and you just got to see the new 3-D boobies, but you need a new plug-in. So the next thing you, know installing software all over your machine just to see some big mammary glands wiggle back and forth.. We all do it... so don't try and deny it cause I won't believe you.
So I was pretty sure I had been inflected and yesterday, after running across a file I didn't think belong in my WINNT subdirectory, I and grabbed Ad-aware and gave it a test run. Ad-aware has numerous configuration options, searches both your hard drives and your registry for all known spyware, has a command line interface, an auto search, a spyware install block and lots of other cool features. It also has a handy dandy spyware removal feature. After running Ad-aware, I was shocked to discover that I had not one, but three spyware programs running on my machine. Serves me right for practice unsafe computer. Anyways, Ad-aware cleaned up the mess and got rid of all the crap. I'm still probably gonna have to do a reinstall at some point in the near future as it is possible that Ad-aware miss stuff it doesn't know about. However, I do feel better knowing that at least three spyware programs are no long running on my machine.
So get yourself some spyware protection today.
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
The Deep Dark Underbelly of the Star Wars Myth, or Ramayana Remembered
It's a fact: Star Wars is a blatant plagiarism of an ancient Asian legend, and the long lines of devout Star Wars freaks are really unscrupulous Asian copyright busters. From Indonesia to Thailand to Nepal, videos are available for sale or rent before they're even released in the US and UK due to this nerdy camcorder-clutching bunch. (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
Johnnie Royale's Guide to Wakes
Wakes can present problems for Bad People of the Future. (If you don't know what a BPotF is, you need to read more of the PDJ.) Sure, your friend is gone and you miss him and that really sucks; it does, I know. But all Bad People of the Future are gonna die, and they have all accepted that fact. They do deserve, however, to have one final kickass party to celebrate all the bad things they've done in the past, present and future. And you, as a friend, have to make sure that their desire for a final send off is well executed (sorry for the pun). That's just the way of BPotFdom. (More...)
A Blast from the Past! Pao Tzu goes over and under the crucial variables in the production and consumption of Salvia Divinorum. A must read for psychonauts of all stripes. (More...)
40 Acres, a Mule, and a Crummy 90-Second Spot on Weekend Update
Consider the plight of the Black Man. The Black Man on "Saturday Night Live," I mean. Has there ever been a more pathetic thing than a token unredeemed for 28 years? Where is the NAACP when you really need them? (More...)