As a frequent visitor to the Pit, I keep seeing OPs about spyware crippling computers. Can someone give me the skinny on Spyware and how you can tell if it’s installed on your computer? How seriously does it infect performance? Does it get past firewalls? How do you get infected?
I’d just like to be aware when I might have a problem. In case you’re interested, I’m running XP, with Zone Alarm as a firewall. Thanks in advance.
There is a sticky at the top of this forum that addresses most of your questions.
Thanks I’ve really got to get into the habit of reading stickys.
A number of spyware programs infect you by exploiting security holes in Internet Exploder^H^HExplorer. Just visiting a bad page can get it on your machine. I reccomend switching to Firefox or Opera to close this hole(Both are all-around better browsers anyways - using IE after being used to Firefox is almost painful to due IE’s lack of features like pop-blocking or tabbed browsing). Other spyware programs come bundled with other programs - Bonzi Buddy, certain P2P apps, ect, and these programs will often break if you remove the spyware sections. The solution to this is to not download these programs, and find non-spying alternatives(which exist for just about everything that does come bundled with spywares.)
To keep your machine clean, I reccomend getting Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, and CWShredder, among other programs. The way spyware is these days, you are going to need all three if you are on a Windows box.
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can someone explain the ^H^H thingy
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It is used to indicate the key combination control-H, which is the ASCII character backspace. Defined about 40 years ago, when many I/O devices (like teletypes) actually physically did a backspace and printed over the previous character. If you see it now, it is generally a way to make a sarcastic comment.
Any thoughts on how or why it developed this way? Whenever I see it it appears to accompany some snarkiness so I see the association with sarcasm but always been a bit too dim to work out why.
Is this actually correct? My understand was that you had to open a bad attachment or be silly enough to say “yes” to some sort of download etc and that just visiting pages was not enough. What’s the SD?
If you have your ActiveX permissions set too low, websites can launch an ActiveX program on your computer without you knowing it. Gator is notorious for this. Unfortunately, Windows defaults to low permissions, and most users never change the defaults.
It derives from science fiction fanzines, where there was a convention of writing a word and then crossing it off. For example, the italics in the following would have a line through it: The latest Gor abomination book.
When the SF fans went online, they looked for a way to achieve the same result, since you couldn’t cross out. Since ^H was known to be the backspace (these were computer geeks, too, though when I first went online, I need to know this to correct anyting), it was used instead.
I still am waiting to see someone explain how tabbed browsing is any different from the buttons on the taskbar on MSIE, BTW.
Depends how much desktop room you’ve got. It’s not much different, they’re just all together, and in a different place. It allows you to easily differentiate between programs and webpages, which is nice: alt-tabbing is a pain (to me) if there are 15 or so explorer windows open. Cycling through the tabs works in both directions (the “1” and “2” keys in Opera) as opposed to just one. As well as this, the control over the tabs provided is generally better than in IE. If I think a link looks interesting but don’t want to interrupt what I’m reading I just middle-click on it, and it silently opens in a new background tab while I carry on reading the original page. IE only has a “new page in foreground” option. I can open linked pages, where the links I click on one page are always opened in the second (very useful for browsing documentation, so you can have the contents page constantly open on the left). There’s more than this, too. It’s not so much a case of one massive improvement, it’s just lots of little nice things that add up to a huge difference. It’s a lot like how new versions of Windows always seem initially unremarkable, then you go back to the old ones and wonder “this doesn’t do X? How on earth did I live without it?”
I agree, it doesn’t sound earth-shattering, but it’s really worth trying. You may not find it’s all that and a side of fries (I was sceptical at first too) but you may also be pleasantly surprised.
I find the tabbed browsing SO superior because of two things:
I can fit in more tabs at the top of Firefox than I can buttons on the taskbar, and they never stack up.
I can make the new pages load in the background instead of popping up on top of what I’m looking at: I’ll take that thread, and that one, and that one… All loading out of sight and not getting in the way.
Delicious.
Not wishing to appear too dumb, but how do you change the defaults?
From IE window, go to Tools, Internet Options, Privacy, and push the slider to Medium High. This will prevent most, if not all, drive-by downloads of spyware. However, what it won’t prevent are the “new and improved” full screen popup windows that you can’t seem to close. Make sure you get a popup blocker too :smack:
I should add that after you change your Privacy settings, you might get MORE popup windows because instead of automatically installing the software, you will now be asked if you “want to install and run X.” Be careful, because they tend to switch the “yes” and “no” boxes around sometimes just to trick you.
There are actually two characters commonly used to erase, backspace (^H, hex 0x08) and delete (^?, hex 0xff), and different systems did not necessarily agree on their respective purposes. Very often, the default for logging in to a system would set the erase character to be delete, but your keyboard would send a backspace character. If you weren’t paying attention, you would get something like:
I told off^H^H^Hthe idiot^H^H^H^H^Hboss…
From my background as an old Mainframer concerned about efficiency, here’s one difference that I find important. (I started when mainframes running a large business had less power than I now have in a PDA I carry in my pocket!)
When you have 2 buttons on the taskbar, you actually have 2 complete copies of IE running on your machine at the same time, both taking up memory and using CPU cycles. (And IE is a large & complicated program.)
When you have 2 tabs in a tabbed browser, you have only a single copy of the browser running on your machine and using up memory & CPU cycles. That browser will create a sub-task for each active tab, but these use less resources from your computer.
So a tabbed browser should be inherently more efficient than a non-tabbed one. That may not be as important with newer, faster machines. But somehow, even the newest, fastest hardware seems to get overloaded by the newest, biggest software releases, so efficiency always seems to still be important.
Well, using tabs for browsing certain sites, especially forums like this one, keeps everything more organized and easier to find - I can simply go through a forum like the GQ, and open each thread that looks interesting with a simple middle click, and then go back to them. I also use mouse gestures, which means I can switch to a new tab with a small flick of the wrist, and not have to move the mouse nearly as much. (I am a geek, therefore, will do no more work than is needed.)
Overall, for my browsing habits, using tabs save me a considerable amount of time. Switching betweens tabs is ~.25 second faster(yes, I had a friend time that) than switching between taskbar buttons. Overall, this saves me a couple minutes every day, which adds up - I would lose over a day of my life for every year I stuck with using IE. :eek: Firefox only took ~10 minutes to download and set up.
Tabs means you can be everywhere at once. They are much tidier than multiple windows and easier to navigate between.
When I enter a forum in SDMB I simply right click (it’s configurable, so you can chose you’re own way of opening new tabs) on each thread that interests me. Then I move my way across each tab, left to right. No waiting for threads to load, they do it all in the background. No having to reload back and forth between the main forum page. No losing track of which window you’re on.
I’ve said it before; IMHO Firefox spanks IE’s behind. And it’s only a beta version!
Regarding the ^H question, in the teletype era, when no video screens were available to see what you typed, if you typed a letter, it was immediately printed and/or punched to paper tape and/or transmitted. So you can see there was no way to erase the character, but a backspace typed immediately afterwards served as a “disregard previous” instruction. Two bad chars required two backspaces, etc.