Increase in malware

Louisa Hearn (in the Sydney Morning Herald via The Blog Herald) reports a large increase in malware targeting computer uses. Moreover, hackers are becoming more innovative by residing on blogs and community sites like wikis.

"Photo albums, scrapbooks, blogs, screensavers and free greeting cards are all becoming potentially dangerous destinations as hackers and cyber criminals take advantage of a lack of security features on many of the hosting sites where they reside."

Spyware and adware

After reading the article on spyware and adware below (7/17/05), I decided to update my Dell desktop at home, spending about 8 hours online reading and downloading freeware, including Ad-aware, MS AntiSpyware, Hijack This, SpyBlaster, and quite a few other free items Saturday night at school instead of at home via a modem. Sunday morning, I installed most of it, reenabled the firewall, ran the software, and got lots of popups asking for permission to "allow" or "deny." Some of it I recognized, and some I didn't. Taking care of a PC is almost a full-time job unless you want to pay someone else hundreds of dollars. A good starting web-site full of information is the "Home PC Firewall Guide" with links to hundreds of online sources and articles.

Disposable PCs

According to a NY TImes article, PC owners are beginning to buy low-end computers rather than take the time to maintain and rid their machines of malware. As Bora Ozturk said, it took him 15 hours to learn how to transfer pictures and music from a paralyzed machine to another one before doing a clean re-install on the hard drive. I recommend buying a Mac.

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