I’ve been having a lot of trouble with spyware recently. I bought a new monitor for the desktop which has spurred me on to using it more often and the more powerful 3D card (vs my laptop) is useful for my final year project as well.
It seems trying to keep a couple of desktops from getting infected is a full time job. I swear, I was *this* close to breaking out the Gentoo install CDs on the desktop the other day.
Fucking Windows. Why is drive by installation of software so easy, even with FireFox? You don’t even get prompted for any bizarre downloads or for any files to be run, it’s insidious. Some of the software is just plain aggressive (I’m looking at you, CoolWebSearch).
What a pain.
The only upshot of all this is that it seem that it can’t infect your machine/spread the infection if you are logged in as a limited user rather than an administrator. At which point any readers using Linux/Mac OS/BSD/anything !Windows slap their foreheads and go
Common sense, duh!
Yes, indeed. Although have you tried running Windows without Administrator access on a home machine? It’s next to impossible. I always find myself switching accounts to install this or change that. Not exactly good for the work flow.
Apparently Vista will have a feature similar to sudo or gksudo which should ease the pain of working as a non-privileged user on a home desktop, although saying that sort of stuff kind of makes me feel a bit faint. It’ll be fixed in the next version, Microsoft will save us, ooh, a novel new feature, etc. Not much use right now, is it? Particularly when the *NIX-a-likes of the world have had this sort of facility for, what – 20 odd years?
Grrrmrmmhmh mutter mutter…
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