Burned by Downloads
Ooh, I just love that poetic justice. A large number of people that I know are discovering the joys of spyware, adware, trojan horses and the like. These are pieces of software or cookies that are unknowingly downloaded to a person's computer. Sometimes they come from visiting certain web sites, sometimes they piggy-back on other seemingly-legitimate (including freeware) and sometimes they piggy-back on illegitimate software/music/video downloads.
This software has different uses. Sometimes it triggers advertising popups straight from your hard drive at random times. Sometimes it tracks historical info on your computer and reports it to a third-party site later without your permission. Sometimes it brings down your entire computer like a virus would.
Microsoft Monitor is a site that I visit regularly. They are a professional consulting firm and this particular blog reports regularly about all aspects of Microsoft business. This link has an interesting article describing how some grade-schoolers have had some havoc apparently because of seemingly-innocent downloads the children have been making.
I know one or two people that no longer download illegitimate music because of the apparent risk of downloading this kind of stuff. I know my sister accidentally downloaded adware a few months ago while downloading some other legitimate freeware. "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
I do not download music or movies onto my computer to burn so I love this poetic justice - the burners are getting burned.
Disclaimer: It's not a guaranteed problem, so feel free to download "free" stuff at your own risk. Adaware can help clean these things up. And if you disagree and think it's fine to download music or whatnot then go right ahead, don't let me stop you.
5 comments:
It's not just downloads that cause stupid viruses. See, I discovered that just by looking up some lyrics on a nice little website. I ended up having something like 686 viruses or maybe it was 6 868, I don't remember. All I have to say is thank goodness my dad works with computers!
There's plenty of free anti-spyware and adware stuff on the net.
Comes with the territory. Definately worth it.
It may come with the territory but it seems to me that this is news to many people. It's certainly a new danger that I only learned about within the past six months or so.
And I think that Abe would disagree that it's oh-so-easy to deal with.
Nah, the funniest thing is that Sherman Networks is screaming about Kazaalite, the hacked program that removes all the spyware from Kazaa. Copyright violation, you see.
Stupid downloading...stupid computers...oh wait, stupid me! Yeah, I guess it was too good to be true, but on the plus side I saved myself from renting about 15 movies and buying about 20 CDs. However, when the viruses make it a pain to do legal things like word processing, surfing the internet and playing legally owned games, it quickly becomes not so worth it. The thing that really screwed me was that it was some of the programs I downloaded to make downloading safe that had piggy-backers.
Post a Comment