“In running a computer repair business, I think I am seeing more PCs in a typical week than the average bear. And there are some trends emerging that I think are really disturbing. The spyware and adware people really are ruining the computing experience for a lot of us,” James Derk writes for Scripps Howard News Service.
“After returning a computer to a grateful customer, more often than not they will ask, ‘How did all of this junk even get on my PC?’ And more often than not, it was not something they did intentionally. A pop-up will jump out and say ‘you have spyware on your PC! Click here to remove it.’ Many people will do just that and WHAMMO you’re infected. More infections will build on those and pretty soon your PC is unusable thanks to hundreds of pop-ups or slowed down to a crawl via tons of spyware,” Derk writes.
“Removing it is no big deal if you’re comfortable with the Windows registry and some of the current tools out there. But what percentage is the computing population is that? I have to wonder how many people are running screaming to Apple products just for this scourge alone,” Derk writes.
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Study: Apple’s Mac OS X ‘world’s safest and most secure’ operating system – November 02, 2004
Sick of spyware, adware infecting your PC? Don’t fret, just get a Mac – November 01, 2004
Spyware plagues Windows users while Mac users surf Net with impunity – November 01, 2004
Mossberg: Apple iMac G5 ‘powerful, affordable, virus-free with better, more modern OS than Windows XP’ – September 23, 2004
next thing you know, they are gonna blame Apple for writing the spyware LOL
“next thing you know, they are gonna blame Apple for writing the spyware”
It’s a conspiracy, y’know. And Bush is behind that, too, just like he’s responsible for acne, people tripping on sidewalks…
…people getting shot at in Iraq, cigarettes killing thousands of people every month…
mike prefers people getting killed by terrorists in the US instead of Iraq.
mike doesn’t think anyone who smokes is responsible for their own health..
I personally wish a lot more people were switching to the Mac than appear to be. Apple has to really start advertising Macs and their OS… but I preach to the choir here.. :p
The last bear I took my PC to to fix just roared and chased me through the woods.
True, those people getting killed in Iraq would certainly be getting killed by Terrorists in the United States just the same.
The trouble is that Apple can’t really advertise it as virus free because there will be such a backlash of negative publicity at the slightest whiff of a virus.
Yeah, and those Iraqi militants are all just a bunch of peace loving souls that would never hurt anyone, muchless support those that fly planes into buildings or blow up train stations.
Hit iraqi (and others) -> more young iraqis and others join the jihad movement -> more terrorists -> more people killed in and outside US. So which part of this chain reaction the majority of American don’t seem to understand (or should I say care)?
A high percentage of Americans believe in God. A ludicrous number believe in the literal truth of the Bible, which was written by man and selectively edited over hundreds of years for the benefit of the politicians/church (the two go hand in hand).
Why are these people afraid of dying ? Won’t the terrorists get them up to heaven sooner ?
[i[Priests and fools say
we are but�animate clay,
but rude vessels
housing immortal souls
But the dead only quickly decay
They don’t go about being born and reborn
and rising and falling like souffl�
The dead only quickly decay
It would be swell
to see some folks burn in Hell
but when they go
it’s just as pleasant to know
that the dead only quickly decay
They don’t go about being born and reborn
and rising and falling like souffl�
The dead only quickly decay
Think running a Mac means you are invulnerable? Not so
http://search.us-cert.gov/query.html?rq=0&ht=0&qp;=&qs;=&qc;=&pw=100%&ws=1&la;=&qm=0&st=1&nh=25&lk=1&rf=2&oq;=&rq=0&si=1&qt=Mac+OS+X
Security Begins at Home.
Think running a Mac means you are invulnerable? Not so
http://search.us-cert.gov/query.html?rq=0&ht=0&qp;=&qs;=&qc;=&pw=100%&ws=1&la;=&qm=0&st=1&nh=25&lk=1&rf=2&oq;=&rq=0&si=1&qt=Mac+OS+X
Security Begins at Home.
well, if your mom got decapitated by a bomb blowing your house to bits, you’d probably change from a peace loving guy to a militant too. And then some armchair asshole in the United States would type into an MDN forum about how you were a Terrorist from the beginning.
G-go-spank-yo-self
The Iraqis didn’t need terrorists to kill them, they had Saddam.
As the mass graves have demonstrated.
Hywel
The same can be said of Muslims and the Koran. The difference being that American Christians aren’t preaching “Death to the infidel Muslims” in their churches.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it (then pass it on back).
Wow, “mike” got spanked pretty good.
And “Hywel”, too. Cool.
You insidious cretins can’t get it through your heads that most Iraqi’s welcomed the Coalition involvement in cleansing their nation of scumbags, from Saddam on down.
As to the infection issue, we (long-time Mac users) will all look back on this time period one day and see it as the beginning of the flood that it was. It’s sooooooo good to be living through this turn of events . . . as in, people turning AWAY from the Wintel PC! My Apple stock is just so very, very pretty to look at nowadays. I CAN’T WAIT until mid-January and Apple’s next quarterly report. Whooo!!!
BTW . . . (sarcasm) nice prose, Hywel (/sarcasm).
Found: 46 Secunia Security Advisories
Mac OS X URI Handler Arbitrary Code Execution
2004-05-17
Apple Filing Protocol Insecure Implementation
2004-03-01
Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities
2004-10-05
Apple Mac OS X Security Update Fixes iChat Vulnerability
2004-09-17
Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities
2004-09-08
Mozilla / Mozilla Firefox Apple Java Plugin Tab Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-08-30
Netscape Apple Java Plugin Tab Spoofing Vulnerability
2004-08-27
Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities
2004-08-10
Apple Mac OS X Internet Connection Privilege Escalation
2004-07-27
Mac OS X Multiple Unspecified Vulnerabilities
2004-05-30
Mac OS X Volume URI Handler Registration Code Execution Vulnerability
2004-05-22
Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities
2004-05-04
Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities
2004-04-07
Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities
2004-02-24
Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities
2004-01-27
Mac OS X Local Denial of Service Vulnerability
2004-01-05
Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities
2003-12-22
Mac OS X cd9660.util Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
2003-12-16
Mac OS X Insecure Default DHCP Packet Handling Vulnerability
2003-11-27
Mac OS X Security Update Fixes Multiple Vulnerabilities
2003-11-20
Mac OS X Terminal Application Unspecified Vulnerability
2003-11-06
Don’t Gloat, 2005 could be much worse.
“The difference being that American Christians aren’t preaching ‘Death to the infidel Muslims’ in their churches.”
Nah. Only Jerry Falwell.
Happy New Year,
And the point is?…
Apple fixes flaws in their OS –before– there is a problem?
Yes, and let’s all thank Be Careful & Updated for screwing up the layout on the page for all us small window browsers. Hint, dummy, use code like so.
So now that we got rid of Saddam, we are killing Iraqi’s. Yes yes yes, this Iraq war has been good for killing people – our soldiers, their civilians, and the insurgents that have spawned in the wake of our invasion. Killing people good, somehow helps war on Terror.
LRL,
You must be one of those illiterates who think that there’s a link between Iraq and Al Queda.
Well here’s a news flash. Your buddies in the Bush administration have admitted it. Still, their minions seem to have missed it! That means you! Sheesh.
At least I bit my tongue while I lied to the UN. You fools swallow the lies hook, line and sinker!
CP
Happy New Year,
You dork. That whole list is less than what happened on the Windows platform in the past freaking week!
Get some perspective, because you are sorely lacking in that area.
Yeah, go screaming to a local apple retail store today!
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />
http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?14@204.V9AYawUfAjh.1@.5998b321
Last I heard 80% of Iraqes wanted the US gone and I’m sure that the 100 thousand or so dead Iraqi civilians are probably not happy with being liberated. We are generating terrorists in Iraq, and the middle east in general, much faster than we can kill them. A US invasion of Iraq is, I’m sure, an Al-Quada wet dream.
In the long run it’s going to turn out that the only thing holding Iraq together was Hussein. Without a brutal bastard like Saddam running the country, all the religious nutjobs start trying to get the upper hand and whammo, you’ve got the current situation.
And meanwhile we are almost compleatly unprotected at home and the millitary is falling appart at the seams because it is so overextended.
G-go-spank-yo-self
I never thought of it that way, okay lets pull out and really f— em up.
The interim Gov crumbles, “insurgents” turn into warlords, Iraq becomes feudal, extreme fundamentalism takes a foothold similar to post soviet occupied Afghanistan. The Iraqi people are are more oppressed then when Saddam was around.
We Are There, we need to stick it out. While we are there we cannot let local hooligans rule the day.
We are the first military in HISTORY that specifically tries to limit collateral damage with surgical strike weapons and people still act as though we are on a blitzkrieg rampage killing indiscriminately.
Before you say – We shouldn’t be there in the first place?
Yeah, gee well 12 years of UN sanctions sure were working just fine.
Viruses and Terrorists? Yeah I guess I can see the connection, if you streeeeecchhh it a bit. Sooooo going to war in Iraq was like buying a PC?
Mike prefers Americans to get killed in Iraq instead of in America.
Steev: If you believe that the US is trying to limit collatoral damage, you’re sadly mistaken. You don’t use depleted uranium shells. You don’t use cluster bombs. You don’t bomb shopping malls because there’s a shaky intelligence report stating the Saddam might be in a restaurant in there.
This is a country where tact, diplomacy, understanding and a coherent exit strategy were needed. This is simply not the US Army way of dealing with things. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers were surrendering during the initial stages of the war. They had no interest in fighting. Millions of Iraqis were grateful for the intervention, but horrified at just how fucking clumsy it was. The conservative estimate is that 100,000 Iraqis have been killed. That figure does not include Fallujah, because it skews the sample too much. It could be much higher.
And of those dead, it could easily be 90% civilian.
This is simply carelessness. It was done with unnecessary and indecent haste. Stupid mistakes like raising an American flag over gained territory spells occupation to the locals rather than liberation.
Interviews with American pilots shocked me during the early war. They came back from their missions excited and pumped having shot at anything that bloody moved. Not all will be like that, I’m sure, but the seemed to see it like a video game rather than a deadly serious job.
I must say that despite not wanting British troops involved, they appear to have conducted themselves in a much more serious manner. This is undoubtedly as a result of lessons learned in the (American funded) terrorist Northern Ireland, where they did their serious fucking up 30 years ago. In an interview with a British pilot, he hadn’t used any of his weapons because he could not be sure of the targets. The intelligence did not match 100% with what he saw on the ground, so he didn’t press that button. An American A10 pilot on the other hand, opened fire on a tank that had a big fucking Union Jack painted on the top.
There are always going to be mistakes. There are always going to be civilian casualties. But where there was no particular immediate threat, a slower methodical, careful approach would have suited a liberation force so much more than the approach that was taken.
I appreciate that Basra is not quite the same as Fallujah, but as soon as that area was secured, the British troops began to wear berets rather than helmets and carried inconspicuous weapons rather than big fucking guns. They also began work on getting water and electricity restored as soon as possible. As a result, they were seen a a benevolent force. And for the exact opposite reasons, the Americans were seen as a malevolent force.
I don’t blame the American troops individually, I just think they’ve largely been badly trained. Badly prepared for this situation.
But I do agree that Iraq cannot be abandoned now. We should never have gone in in the first place, but now it’s FUBAR, it would be heartless to leave without making some effort to right that wrong.
The America’s Army game and the aborted plan for a terrorist futures market are two examples of how wrong the US attitude to war is.
http://www.thearmygame.com/
http://www.mongabay.com/external/pentagon_terror_futures.htm
You guys gave us the sublime M*A*S*H, but on your own version, you had canned laughter, like it was The Beverly HIllbillies or something. Unbelievable.
Well stated Hywel,
I’ll need to read up a bit on the American funded Northern Ireland terrorism.
To ansewer your question “Why are these people afraid of dying ? Won’t the terrorists get them up to heaven sooner ?”
Ever hear the Polka- In heaven there is no Beer?
(iTunes)
And leave it at that, conceeding the discussion for now.
to the tune of “Four Dead in Ohio”
by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Lost ballots and Diebold’s counting
We’re finally on our own
This winter I hear Bush laughing
Vote Fraud in Ohio
Gotta get real ballots
Paperless taking us down
Should have been done long ago
Keep blacks from voting and
TV won’t make a sound
Kerry won, but he said no.
Vote Fraud in Ohio
It was funded by donation to the NORAID ‘charity’ rather than state funded, which is a distinction I failed to make. The silly thing is that American Irish of both ‘sides’ donated because although they remained proud of the Irish roots, they knew nothing about their Irish roots (being protestant might have hinted to them that a donation wasn’t what their ancestors would have wanted).
No beer in heaven ? Better that I rot in my grave then. And I hope I never hear another polka in my life !
Whoever posted that dopey Ohio song, that is. I LOVE it, though, because all the lib make believe excuses for why they lost means they won’t focus on the real reasons. At this rate, 2/3 majorities in the House and Senate are not that far away–ability to make changes to the U.S. Constitution w/o any Dem votes: priceless!
Cheers, friends.
Mac Citizen
You want to be careful about changing the constitution just because you can.
A government with little resistance/opposition is not a good thing. We have experience of this in the UK right now with Blair having a frightening majority. He can pretty much do as he pleases. It would be nice to see his downfall, but he’s going to make millions touring and lecturing in the US when we kick him out of office.
What changes do you think need to be made ?
I thank God that hywel and the silly Lutheran democrat were not around in the 1940’s. We’d be speaking German.
Fight evil….whatever it takes.
Fight spam and viruses…buy a Mac.
Mac dude shows us how delusional the Neo Cons are. He makes a comparison that these times are similer to Germany circa 1940. If we took this completely screwed up analogy and say that Al Queda is the equivalent to Germany, then I guess you can say that in our fight against the Nazi’s we should have attacked Venezuala.
If you wanna make an analogy to Germany during that time, Mac Dude, a better one might be comparing the Neo Cons with the Nazi Party circa 1938. The only problem with this is that it puts you in the Nazi Party, and more sensible people like Hywel and Lutheren speaking out against the Nazi’s before they go too far.
Sheesh you guys are still at it??
It’s pretty sad state of affairs when a lost election is auto-assumed to be fraud.
When the Demos won back in 92 & 96 I surely didn’t jump to conclude there was fraud.
What will it take (beside the Repubs loosing every election) to convince people that our ballot process is not corrupt.
This is what stinks about the internet it allows rumors to propagate widely without any proof.
Hywel, lighten it’s just a song.
‘Smart weapons’ aren’t that good, if your computer crashed as often as they do you’d scrap it. You only have to see how much blue-on-blue there is to get an idea of how much collateral damage is caused.
US mostly uses the tactic of overwhelming force which encourages collateral damage.
Remember in the real war, when Iraq’s army ran away. US continued targetting and destroying water plants, electricity generation and distibution, telephone exchanges even after it was clear Iraq’s army was vanquished. Avoiding collateral damage? These actions are illegal under international law, they are terrorist actions.
The US is the only country in the world to ever have used WMD.
Chemical/Bio weapons used by Saddam were not WMD. You can’t target them reasonably accurately like bombs or missiles, you can’t limit the range of their effect due to wind (so they blow back on to your own forces), you can’t predict how effective they will be because concentrations vary according to the wind.
You can effect more destruction with conventional weapons, like an artillery barrage, than with Chemical/Bio. Armies have been trying to use chemical weapons successfully since at least the first world war and have yet to find them effective.
Saddam apparently killed a few thousand people (estimates seem to max out at 10,000) by chemical weapons, I have never seen any reports of how many chemical weapons were used. So how many weapons (bombs, shells) were used? How many people does a single weapon have to kill before it is defined as WMD? Is it possible that a single chemical/bio weapon could a thousand or more people, maybe, if it was very well deployed in a confined space.
How does this compare with one bomb, as dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which each killed tens of thousands.
Almost all nations with a disproportionate dependance on a single product are totalitarian as it is easier to control the production of wealth, for most of these nations the product is oil. USA supports all these by buying more oil than anyone else.
By attacking Iraq and adding uncertainty to the oil market the despots who sell oil have got much richer, thanks to the USA. The insurgents/terrorists in Iraq have learned that one of their most effective weapons is blowing up oil pipelines, not surprisingly this phenomenum is preading, thanks again USA.
Reduce oil consumption (note not energy consumption) = reduce funding to despots and dictators = reduce conflict.
I wasn’t getting heavy. I found the polka music quite distressing though. It was even worse than an evening at Bob’s Country Bunker with The Good Ol’ Boys (with no beer)
Avoiding collateral damage? These actions are illegal under international law, they are terrorist actions…
Internation Law? Whats that? The UN? They can suck on one…And so can the french…
Countries break internation law every day, including the UK…
BTW…If knowone noticed…the Geneve Convention only applys to the US….
Oh here we go again with the Hiro-Naga arguement.
Please spare us all.
America might regret the use of nukes during WWII but should never seek anyones forgiveness.
By the way, what’s up with that unprovoked attack by the French on the poor people of the Ivory Coast???
Hmm…