I never agreed to no stinkin' EULA!

The BBQ Pit
1

Yesterday, once again, I noticed that my machine was running marginally slower.

“Hmm…” thinks I, “I wonder what could possibly be slowing my computer, which I need to run in tip-top shape in order to be productive and pay my bills? Perhaps a quick view of the Task Manager will explain this annoyance?”

One quick three-finger salute later, I find that, yet again, my computer’s been infested with some soft of spyware. Red Swoosh, this time. I browse on over to their website, in which I find their claim that somehow, some time in the recent past, I said that it was okay for them to load their parasitic program onto my machine, and that I’m just hunky-dory with them hijacking my computer and turning it into a willing dupe designed for the express purpose of compiling a dossier on me and my potential buying habits. Not only that, but I’m just fine with them selling this info to other companies- not that I’d see a dime, of course.

Funny, I don’t remember clicking on ANY EULAs lately.

And the bitch of it is that this tends to happen several times a month. Sure, I can just run AdAware, and remove it easily (although, this time, AdAware didn’t recognize it, and I had to uninstall manually). But fuckit, I shouldn’t have to do so all the damn time!

I simply don’t understand how these supposedly legitimate companies are allowed to disseminate what is effectively a virus- after all, it infects my machine to no obvious benefit to myself- and yet, by sheer virtue of them making money off the deal, it’s all legal and shit. Just saying that the users agree to being ripped off by clicking “accept” on some sort of EULA shouldn’t make it legal- after all, why are so many people surprised when they find this scumware on their computers? And I know for a FACT that I didn’t agree to any EULA lately- which means that some webpage installed it for me, and just ASSUMED that I’d be okay with getting fucked in the processor.

I mean, hell, shouldn’t this sort of underhanded hijacking of my computer and bandwidth be FUCKING ILLEGAL?

Goddammit, I’ve gotten so paranoid, now, that I’m CTRL-ALT-DELETING every day, just so I can make sure nothing ELSE is spying on me. I guess I could install ZoneAlarm so I can at least detect when some sort of spyware attempts to phone home with my pertinent details, but there’s still no good way to detect when some shit-fer-brains gonna-make-a-quick-buck asshole manages to sneak this excrement onto my computer in the first place!

Lissen up, dickheads- this is MY FUCKING COMPUTER! And when I’m at home, I’m on, you guessed it, MY FUCKING COMPUTER! That means that ANY program on those computers had best fucking be some software that I want on it. I DEPEND on these computers for my livelihood- unless, of course, you want to PAY me for the information you’re stealing from me. I don’t care if your website says you have no control over how your clients install the program- you still wrote that shit, and according to every definition I can find, it’s still a fucking trojan, and you’re still fucking stealing my bandwidth and processing cycles! Any time I find out who does business with you- and I will, somehow- I guarantee you that I will NOT do business with THEM.

Fuck.

[SUB]No, I’m not bitter. Why do you ask?[/SUB]

2

Hey, help a poor soul out.

Computer illiterate I am not, but I’m not exactly sure how to get rid of one that is on my machine.

When I give the Boy Scout salute on my keyboard, what the hell should I be looking for? I run a cookie watcher, but apparently it snuck through.

Help me out, and I shall lend my voice in all it’s obnoxious glory, to yours.

Tripler
Also under siege.

3

What I do is just look for some sort of running task in the list that I don’t recall seeing before… then I do a search for that file on the Internet (Google is your friend). If it’s some sort of spyware, chances are that someone else on the web has spotted it for what it is. Then I try to find out where, on my machine, that loathsome program has taken refuge. Most of them, thankfully, do include a way to uninstall them from your system.

AdAware, by LavaSoft, is currently the best weapon against 'em- it’ll scan your system, point 'em out for you, and remove 'em for you. Of course, those who write scumware are always trying to prevent this from happening, so you have to update AdAware pretty often.

SpyWareInfo is another good resource.

4

The spyware “agreement” is usually buried several pages downstream in the installer program, where you’ll never see it.

Another vote here for Ad-Aware. It’s nice that someone is working to keep this crap off our computers for free. I also recommend a freeware program called “EndItAll” It shows additional running tasks that don’t show up when you press Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

I also recommend Quixotix control manager. It will show all the ActiveX components installed on Internet Explorer and give you the choice of removing them.

5

Keep in mind also that lots of web pages out there send .DLL files to your computer. Somehow I think that at least THAT should be illegal. They’re installing a program on my computer, without my consent, in order to take private information about me and sell it.

Makes me fucking nuts.