[SEL] spyware OT

[Paul Pavlinovich]

Depends what you do with your computer - if you go to web pages and have 
all the scripting (e.g. Java) turned off then really nothing can touch 
you. If you never open anything attached to an email other than pictures 
(jpg, gif) then again nothing can really touch you.

Most of what spyware software finds is bullshit anyway - big deal you've 
got some cookie on your computer or something in your registry left over 
from busted software verison X. Do you know what a cookie is? It is a 
little file with about 20 bytes of data designed to allow website X to 
know you've been there before. Sometimes rude website Y will look for 
website X's cookie and they know you've been there. Big Deal.

What is a registry entry? Can it hurt you? No. It is like the win.ini 
file of old except that it is a central repository - it is nothing but a 
series of key/value pairs. Programs store data there that is needed from 
one run of the program to another. The worst that happens is that your 
registry fills up with so much shit that it fails. This used to happen 
regularly, but I've never heard of it happening since XP SP2.

The only way spyware can hurt you is when it runs on your computer - to 
get there YOU must have installed it or ran something else that 
installed without your knowledge. Do you ever read the fine print on the 
"free" software you downloaded and installed? You should. Understand 
what you're agreeing to when you press that button.

On the other hand, if you download and open things like software, word 
documents, power point presentations, emails with attached scripts then 
you better have a virus scanner or you'll be dead sooner or later- or 
worse, you'll becoming a diving board for malicious software to do nasty 
things like attack some other computer (isolating the real culprit - you 
get blamed) or sending spam to all the addresses in your inbox. Yes, Rob 
- I know you use a Mac and while the Mac is based on Unix these days so 
is considerably better, you're a fool if you run nothing. Even on my 
unix systems I run AV. It is mostly use to scan all incoming and 
outgoing mail long before windows gets near it.

Anti Spyware software? Nope.
Anti Virus? Yep.

If you don't want a scanner to live on your computer, then use 
Trend-Micro. The scanner downloads when YOU run a scan and leaves 
nothing lurking to eat resources.

Regards
Paul

Rob Skinner wrote:
> I don't use anti-virus or anti-spyware software.  I get along just fine.
> Get rid of that crud.  It just slows down your computer.
>
> Rob
>