Overreach

As happens these days, my laptop computer has been getting steadily clogged up with programs generating popup ads, spyware, and all kinds of other crap over the six months that I have had it. (I have been fortunate enough or well enough defended that I have avoided getting any worms and viruses). I have largely just put up with this. However, a week or two ago, one of the programs that has been showing me popup ads decided to start showing occasional pictures that were essentially hard core pornography, in the hope that I would click on the link and buy more hard core pornography.

This was enough for me, and I have gone through a thorough spyware and irritate-ware removal process, something I should have done a while back. Spybot Search and Destroy informed me that there were over 120 separate pieces of anti-social software of one kind or another installed on my system. Ugh.

Well, they are now gone.

Although I have not myself had a worm or virus infection, several people I know have, and I have been helping out in cleaning these up. One friend of mine received an infection from a variant of the Gabot worm, and this managed to mess things up pretty thoroughly before we managed to kill it.

Update: That wretched porn came back. Either the both Spybot S&D and Ad-aware both missed it, or I visited the site that was responsible for installing it in the first place again and it got reinstalled. (And no, I didn't attempt to rip the new Beastie Boys CD). Now running the software again, but I am very pissed off. I might be about to abandon Internet Explorer and start using Firefox exclusively, too.