Posted by Richard at September 18th, 2005

Part of my excuse for not posting recently is that my computer became utterly riddled with spyware, and so had to be rebooted entirely, with all the driver downloading and frustration that this entails.

It got infected whilst I was doing some entirely legitimate surfing (looking up sites on the superb Icelandic band Sigur Ros), without having even downloaded anything: the computer started flashing up all sorts of warnings about spyware that were in fact just manifestations of the programme that had weasled its way onto my machine. The desktop background changed to a warning about spyware, and the task manager on my computer stopped working. There were less drastic solutions than re-booting the whole thing, but they seemed rather complicated, and my computer deserved a bit of a clear out anyway.

Still, I think that the people who write programmes like this deserve to be strung up by their testicles, and spat on, until they promise to devote their undoubtedly formidable programming skills to something a little more positive than forcing someone to waste about five hours mucking around with their computer, instead of doing something useful.

Rant over.

In other news, I met some nice Jehovah’s Witnesses the day before yesterday: they didn’t try and infect me with anything (apart from religion, rather halfheartedly), and they gave me a free book full of pseudo- science and quotation out of context. Lovely people though.

*Bone weighs in with his view, use Firefox or Opera for your web browsing, virus and spy check regularly (using more than one programme for each if you can be bothered)

Check outTop 10 reasons to switch to firefox from everyone’s favourite personal productivity blog, lifehacker

Also, there’s plenty of anti-spy/malware advice over at SpywareInfo

Bone, looking out for people, as ever.*