You guys all know that the binary newsgroups are a good way to get whatever images you want for free, right? Without wondering just what trickery that webpage is using to get additional "stuff" onto your PC?
On a related note, it seems to me that the way to "deal" with active-reporting-spyware (so not just cookies with serial numbers that track where your machine has been) is to figure out how each system "reports back to the mother ship" and to use that to report back with whatever data I want them to see about me.
I, too, spend some of my week cleaning spyware off of computers (usually neighbors in a panic). It's not hard work (don't make any money from it, though) and it beats hell out of fixing the neighborhood tractor (I live in a cohousing community and we share things like large lawn care machinery) which I usually emerge from at least filthy and often bruised/bloody. There
is something appealing about working on machinery that you're
supposed to hit with a hammer sometimes, though...
One spyware defense that has worked for me in the places I do IT work for is to add the domains for the worst offenders to the local DNS server and to set each to a non-routable IP. Have a look
here for a list of sites you
might want to mis-direct.
If I wanted to get fancier, I could point it at the IP of a "sentinel" machine so the logs would let me figure out if/which PC needs a cleaning.
I
am moving everyone over to firefox. Note that if you do this, you should also set all IE "security zones" to "high" (except for the "trusted" zone - and add windowsupdate.microsoft.com to the list of websites on this list - and make sure that sites in that zone have permission to run activeX (make it "without prompt" if you're expecting windows update to run automatically).
Apologies for at-least-somewhat serious comments. Back to tales of online hookers...
