Thursday, June 23, 2005

Adware vendors kept on the ropes by a harvard student...

The site, benedelman.org , regularly analyzes adware and exposes companies that sneak the stuff onto PCs without giving users sufficient warning. In his most recent post, Edelman contends that Google maintains relationships with adware vendors despite Google's policy against doing business with companies that fail to adequately seek consent before their software installs itself.

His work "is just totally invaluable," says Richard Stiennon, head of threat research for Webroot Software, a spyware-cleaning company. " It pulls the cloak off people's eyes. All you hear is claims from some of these vendors that they're good guys and don't do bad things and he turns around and says, 'What about this site where you're installed by a drive-by download? - Read the Full Article

This is a great article, Ben Edelman is doing good by informing users on how & how easy it is for internet users to get spyware and adware on their systems. Reasons he states on his site, are reasons why I do not use spyware & adware programs, because they too can install adware & spyware without the users knowledge. Now days I.E. is vulnerable more than ever with all the BHO's being installed without the user being aware of them. BHO's (Browser Helper Object) can be installed by the user or without the users knowledge. These result in Popups, even when using software like Earthlink's Popup Blocker, Yahoo's Popup Blocker and others like them. A good practice to help prevent these issues can be to shut off some ActiveX abilities in your
Internet Options, or Log in on your computer with a User that has low permissions, like not allowing to install programs, along with other settings you can slow down and sometimes stop these annoyances, However, I would recommend using a different browser than I.E., I strongly suggest Mozilla's FireFox or its own browser Mozilla 1.7.8.

[Source & Article:
Networkworld.com]
Bens Site: www.benedelman.org/

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