OK, so I seemed to have a problem with spyware, namely, every day I would run Ad-Aware and find four or five new pieces of “ad-tracker” or “data-miner” cookies. So I went and installed Norton Firewall, which I hadn’t had since I reformatted a couple weeks ago.
I turned it on, and in the few days I have had it, I have had over 135,000 blocked “things” for the security portion, and over 750 for the privacy. Compare this to the ~30,000 and ~3000 allowed. Is this an unusually high number? Every time I load up IE I notice the number of blocked connections jumps by about ten, and it goes up anywhere between five and fifteen when I go to a new webpage, it seems. This seems very bad, and I’m afraid there might be a not good thing on my PC, but ad-aware still only catches the cookie things (which I still get despite the firewall, although I think there is no way in avoiding those, as I have cookies enabled and that’s how they get there.)
So does anyone have any advice on what to do? (If anything?)
And I still get between four and ten of the “bad cookies” every day when I run ad-aware, any way to avoid these?
(note, I really only go to here, the straightdope main page, and a few other sites regulary, all of which should be safe (places like theonion, or webcomics.)