I get two days off a week – Saturday and Sunday. Saturdays are my "get stuff done" days, Sundays my "chill if I have time" days.
This week, I spent 1 hour and 20 minutes on Thursday night clearing spyware off a mate’s PC. This Sunday, at about 11:00, some malignant evil spyware program trolleyed one of my system files and my PC died around me.
Five hours, one reinstallation of XP on a spare hard drive and some selection cpoy/pasting later (after an unsuccesful re-installation of SP2 and two system rollbacks that didn’t help, plus a manual dissection of the registry to spot some stuff that SpyBot couldn’t find) and I’m back up and running.
That’s half my ******* day off. And as I’m off out tonight (to see Hayseed Dixie in Nottingham), that’s pretty much my day gone.
As such, I’d like to raise a request that everyone lobbies their MPs so that if I catch someone **** who write spyware or viruses, I’m allowed to cut each of their fingers off, then smash their feet to a pulp and then leave them alone in a locked coffin to starve to death. I’d prefer to get away without any fear of arrest, but I can’t guarantee that I won’t at least kick the **** out of anyone I find who writes this stuff.
*******.
Anni: Join the queue.
I blocked an attempt to install a spyware program (I think that is what it was) from a popup ad on Streetmap.co.uk.
Emailed them in a rage and stated that if it ever happened again I would vote with my feet (and tell everyone I know to do the same) and use multimap instead.
They are probably both run by the same company, but hey, its the best I can do. I could subscribe their support email addresses to a mailing list, but I’m not that bitter.
C
I find a good popup blocker (pop up stopper pro), a good anti spyware program (Ad Aware), a good anti virus (AVG) and a good firewall (Sygate) all seem to stop any spyware getting onto my PC. Apart from the usual cookies, I can’t honestly remember the last spyware program I had.
I have managed to avoid most of it – I think my recent ‘infection’ was when my dad was here, and doing his daily ‘free internet lottery’ things.
I’d be happy to hold them down for you, while you kicked them?
I’m using plenty of blockage stuff – Norton Antivirus, SpyBot SD, Kerio Personal Firewall and two popup blockers plus SP2 on WinXP. I have the nasty feeling I just clicked on the wrong button at one point. Gah.
seems more than fair to me…
They’re utter ********. They deserve the ultimate punishment. Gagged and tied in a dark room, while Barry Manilow plays over and over, right next to a pile of my brothers’ dirty socks.