I just received an e-mail saying that the lama song (linked to from Weird Earl’s the other day) is in fact malware, and will cram your hard drive full of spyware.
Now, I’m skeptical, and I checked Snopes. Nothing there yet. And I’m sure the Straight Dope checks sites before recommending them to make sure they’re clean… so the question is, is this true? Has the Lama infected my computer?
If you do a search for “Llama Song” you’ll find it linked from many websites. I have no doubt that some of those sites harbor spyware, and if you don’t have your Internet Privacy settings at least Medium High, they will download without asking your permission first. If you have your settings at Medium High, you’ll likely get a popup asking if you want to install something. This will happen BEFORE the song starts, and many people may mistakenly believe that it’s necessary to install whatever it is in order to view it. What they’ve actually done is downloaded spyware. They could have said NO and still heard the song.