tom takes on the bad computer people
had brunch, went to Taste of Champaign, looked at Circuit City for a car stereo deck, bought Dad optical mouse for Father’s Day, looked at car stereo at Good Vibes, ate Papa Del’s pizza (the BEST) at Dad’s, took Jake for a walk, talked to anna marie for a long time. i miss her. more.
spyware is really starting to piss me off. in today’s post dot-com-bust era, a lot of programs that were previously freeware have turned to bundling spyware apps like Gator/GAIN (more information) to generate revenue. now i’m no über-paranoid nerd, but i don’t like the idea of these shady-ass outfits knowing all of my Internet activities. add to that the myriad viruses i get sent constantly, and i’m not happy. so i did a little research tonight, and allow me to share with you a few steps you can take to protect yourself.
tom’s anti-spyware, anti-ads, and anti-other annoying shit guide
- get an antivirus program like McAfee or Norton
- set the antivirus program up to update its virus definitions weekly
- schedule a weekly virus scan
- download and install Ad-aware, which removes shitty spyware and cookies from shady sites
- in Ad-aware, click on “Configuration,” and in the “Options” tab, check “Remove components automatically.” (note: do not do this if you need to use DiVX 5. for more info, see the article about the DiVX/GAIN crack further down in this entry.)
- download and install RefUpdate from Ad-aware’s site, which updates Ad-aware’s definitions
- run a full scan of your computer with Ad-aware (this takes a long time)
- set Windows Task Scheduler to run RefUpdate weekly. use the command line parameters “/0″ (for non-proxy access) and “/server1″ to set the download server. for more info, see the Ad-aware site.
- set Windows Task Scheduler to run Ad-aware weekly
- download and install Tiny Personal Firewall (or Zone Alarm, but Tiny Personal Firewall does the same thing with a smaller resource footprint)
- run all of your normal Internet apps and create permanent rules in Tiny Personal Firewall to allow these apps access to the net. block anything shady looking, especially GATOR (it runs on startup)
- block all ad sites (this is pretty damn neat!) by downloading a new HOSTS file from Gorilla. this prevents your computer from accessing ad sites on the net (by redirecting DNS requests for the servers to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1[localhost]), which makes your browsing experience a LOT nicer.
- my recommendation: open the new HOSTS file in a text editor and delete the section marked “Not for everyone.” this will ensure that sites like Yahoo!, Excite, etc. look fine, even though they’re serving you ads.
- my recommendation: download eDexter, which serves a transparent HTTP server on your machine to respond to IMG requests to blocked sites. this prevents images from blocked sites showing up as 404. instead, you can configure them to all be transparent GIFs.
- download updates to the HOSTS file regularly from Stephen Martin’s site to block new ad sites.
that will do a pretty good job of protecting you from viruses and spyware. some nice apps, like DiVX, require spyware to work properly, but there is a crack for DiVX’s bundling of GAIN. and for a good overview of dealing with spyware and ads, check out Dugan Chen’s site.