Spyware

In one of my moments of "Well, I best mention this for the less technologically inclined that may wander upon my blog:"

If you are ever randomly browsing the web, and are suddenly inundated with popups saying you have spyware and it offers to remove it: don't believe it. The popups are phony. No, really.

Unfortunately, especially if you are suddenly deluged with popups while browsing Wikipedia, they may also be right: You likely do have spyware. The problem is, it's the spyware that's creating the popups! Sort of a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing hoping the panic of the uninformed will cause them to click "Yes!" and install nasty stuff on their computer.

Don't believe it, and run as many REAL spyware things on your machine as you can. I recommend Ad-Aware for the less advanced. Spybot Search & Destroy is also supposed to be good.

And if you're an advanced user, Bazooka Spyware Scanner is great. It requires manual removal of the spyware, but it will find just about anything.

Also note that "WinAntiVirus Pro! 2005" is a farce. That is the particular product I'm being bombarded by. It is evil. Do not believe it.

Well, that's it for me, I'm off to nuke some spyware. Rock on, kids.