Flashes of Panic

Clive Thompson always knows how to speak to my cynical side. After spending a half-hour or so clearing CWS off yet another of my users’ systems, he linked today to his article in Slate, “Us Like Spies,” explaining “how computer users ask to be doomed to viruses and spyware.”

Thompson’s thesis, essentially, is that we’re too lazy to check up on the software we download and install, and too ignorant of what’s going on in the guts of the machine to understand what could be going wrong and how to fix it. And, largely, he’s right. But there are a number of steps users, even non-technical users, can take to keep their machines spyware and adware light:

1. Don’t use Internet Explorer. Have I mentioned this before?
2. Don’t download stuff just because it looks cool. You don’t need to replace your pointers or have special software to change your desktop picture on a daily basis, or any of a dozen “toolbars” for IE (which we dumped in step 1, remember?)
3. If you download software, get it from a place you trust. I’ll download nearly anything from the Mozilla foundation because they’ve got hundreds of thousands of open-source zealots watching their every move, and if there’s spyware included with their stuff, they’ll get stomped. Likewise nearly every open-source package—these guys exist on their reputation, and they can’t afford to monkey around with shady software.
4. Run one of the many good anti-spyware programs (like AdAware or Spybot) on a regular basis. Weekly is good. Daily is also good.

Am I sour today? Hell yeah. Having my first mug of tea wind up as a lake on the kitchen counter within seconds of adding sugar (and before it reached my lips) was a good start. I have some choice words for the various unicellular organisms I’m seeing in my traffic logs scanning this site for software they can exploit to relay spam, but due to my mood, they’re mostly vicious, obscene, and not fit for sharing with the rest of you wonderful people, because you’re not bitter, jaded burnouts like myself. At least, I hope you’re not.

Now playing: Same Direction from Listen Like Thieves by INXS