[goldstategop]

Spyware? Just wait til you hear major advertisers like J.C Penny and Capital One push the crud on your personal computer. And there's Vonage, Monster, Expedia, Priceline and Orbitz. People hate popups period and any company pushing its products and services through ads that invade customers' privacy and screws up use of their computers will lose them. There's advertising and there's advertising and not all of it is created equal.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[HiTech RedNeck]

That's making many advertisers nervous, though they insist they work with subcontractors and often don't know about any adware use until they get a complaint.

"There's plausible deniability at each tier," said Chris King, product marketing manager at anti-spyware vendor Blue Coat Systems Inc.

But watch these yawning, lugubrious corporations pop a legal cork with extreme promptness if somebody tries to profit unfairly off of their names.

[backhoe]

Crosslinked to my general-purpose malware, browser, OS, and tech collection:

Browser Wars, take two

[UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide]

Song lyric sites are the worst I've run into, worse than porn.
Go only with a firewall (and deny requested permissions) and layers of spyware killers.

[backhoe]

BTW- I can't recall where I read it ( maybe SWI forums, maybe Tiger Direct ) but the figure I saw associated with ad-ware was 2.4 billion ( Yi! ) dollars a year.

Yes, there are that many stupid people in the world...

[Jeff Gordon]

I am not suprised that Vonage would use spyware or spam to advertise. Vonage's TV advertising is specifically and shamelessly targeting stupid people.

[dhuffman@awod.com]

I run Firefox, WebWasher, Ad-Aware, Ad-Watch, Adblock, Flashblock and NoScript. Let 'em try to get commercial bandwidth wastage through.

[Hardastarboard]

I'm sure that given that these corporations have taken my private property for their personal use, they won't mind if I use their property to run a small business of mine. It's only fair.

Of course these corporations could make the argument that in light of the latest Supreme Court ruling that they can use your PC processing power more efficiently than you, and return more to the coffers of the local government than you can. The government would then make it illegal to remove spyware from your computer.

See what a can of worms the Supremes opened up?

[csvset]

Capital One Financial Corp.

What in your wallet PC?

[Free Vulcan]

Outpost firewall
Avast antivirus
AntiVir antivirus
Spyware Blaster
Spyware Guard
Adaware
Spybot S&D
ID blaster
Opera browser
Mailwasher spam filter


All of these are free. I have zero problems. AVG is good too, but doesn't run well on my older Win 98 computer.