"moral of the story: for the love of GOD stop installing "cute games you found for free" on the internet on sketchy-ass sites full of bouncing happy crap!"


Uh...does downloading animated screensavers on your parent's computer count?

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Very likely. "OMG FREE SCREENSAVERS!" is one of the most common ways to Trojan people, either with spyware or straight-out trojans.

The rule of thumb is, if you're downloading it from someplace either 1. you've never heard of, 2. excessively cheesy-looking (smilies and bouncing animated crap EVERYWHERE) or 3. with tons of banner ads ADVERTISING "free" stuff, you're screwing up.

In general, downloading from someplace large and reputable - MSN, ZDNet, Yahoo, or similar - is usually safe, WITH the proviso that you NEED TO READ THE EULA. A big site like that may still offer spywared-up things for download, but they will at least WARN you that they're going to install "ad supported software" or something similar in the EULA.

Open Source stuff is pretty much always okay. Anything that's ACTUALLY Open Source is definitely going to be okay, the problem is that eventually shady bastards will probably start lying and calling their products open source to trick you. If you're paranoid, only trust open source stuff from sourceforge.net - SourceForge is always safe.

You can also generally just google whatever it is you want to download before you download it. Check to see if people are complaining bitterly about what it did to their computer when they installed it - if it's spyware, you'll usually find out pretty quick.

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Your link is b0rked.

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http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/?p=812
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/stay-far-away-from-yapbrowser.html
http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2006/04/yapbrowser-serves-up-zango-andchild.html
http://www.revenews.com/wayneporter/archives/001709.html

All links are worksafe, although the one at vitalsecurity does contain enough of a portion of a banner to see what it is (t-shirt-wearing waist up only).

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ps: original link still works for me off-and-on. I think they may have gotten slashdotted?

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Jebus. I can't believe that.

for the love of GOD stop installing "cute games you found for free" on the internet on sketchy-ass sites full of bouncing happy crap!

After the third time I talked my mother through undoing whatever my father's click-happy ways had done to their computer, I showed her how to reduce his priveleges and lock the registry.

It never ceases to amaze me how many times people will fall for that stuff and act like it's part and parcel of internet access.

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If surfing the internet was like sex, we'd all be living in Nigeria.

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Huh?

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(think sub-Saharan HIV statistics)

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