Evil Spyware

One day I was looking for naked pictures of former attorney general Janet Reno on Google, and I clicked on this link that seemed promising. Lo and behold, about 20 windows started to pop-up, one after another. I’d close one, two more would appear, asking me to install things, and I kept saying “no”. And not the polite “no”, it was the loud and colorfully languaged “no�. Then, after clicking “no” about a dozen times, and seeing that the sea of questions were no way relenting, I did the vulcan live long and prosper on my keyboard to get it to just terminate my web browser. But, it was too late. After I restarted my computer, all of sudden it had become a nesting ground to a gross brood of various new programs that surreptitiously installed itself –like “Bargain Buddy”, and “Cool Web Search”, oh, and the ever popular and bitch to remove “Home Search Assistant”.

I was mortified by this. I think it irks computer science guys even more when stuff like this happens to them–because (arrogantly) we’re better than this. Anyway, today I finally got rid of all my spyware, without having to reinstall windows. I had one particularly pernicious one that couldn’t be removed by conventional means and proved to be quite disabling. It caused my AIM to crash, and slowed my computer down significantly; it went by the name “Home Search Assistant”.

If anyone has this listed on their “Add/Remove” programs list, and having trouble removing it, there is a great step-by-step tutorial online here that will help you out.

Anyway, I finally went Mozilla Firefox all the way now; you won�t catch me dead using Internet Explorer. I recommend you do the same if you happen to like your computer– download it: www.getfirefox.com

FYI: I was obviously kidding about looking for naked pictures of Janet Reno

(It was really for Ruth Ginsberg )