Spyware.

January 14, 2005 2:08 am General

Joe reminds me of the pure misery I endured a week or two ago, when I mis-clicked one window using Internet Explorer [I know, I’m dumb]. Suddenly my desktop turned into a disaster zone – everything grinding to a halt, desktops icons showing various XXX related icons, desktop blacking out with a “Your desktop has been affected by Spyware. Here’s how you fix your desktop, click here!” screen. I spent ages and ages trying to find various processes to kill before my machine stopped swapping like crazy, enough to download Ad-aware. Ran that a couple of times, but to little effect – various nasties would recreate themselves on a reboot, eventually causing a bluescreen everytime I tried to run Ad-aware. Hosed. You have no idea how incredibly frustrating it is as a somewhat technical user not being able to find the root causes [believe me, I checked hundreds of directories, files and entries in the registry that day].

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Well, yes. It’s here, and here.

Although in the 2nd case, I really wish our marketing and executives would acknowledge that it is GNOME under the hood and be proud to advertise that fact. Maybe that’s a failing of the GNOME project [or foundation board] that we haven’t pressed that enough.

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