Hi Divas! I have been asked by my wife, Whisper, to write a tech hints column for the monthly Divine Diva Newsletter and thought it was a great idea. I watched this group growing for several years now and helped behind the scenes where I could. There is an amazing diversity to this group in every way imaginable. Some of you are probably more computer savvy than I am and many, while having a functional knowledge of their machines, can benefit greatly from a little help here and there.

I will not profess to be an expert, merely an avid user with a variety of experience and the resources to find out pretty much anything I need to know. I will attempt to cover topics in a fairly general sense and, as every one’s computer is set up differently, you may find that some of what I write is of no use to you. Any time you start using your computer the potential to make a mess of it exists. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you make backups regularly if you have the means to do so and do not attempt any modifications that you are not comfortable with. As one of my favorite newsletters likes to say “Your mileage may vary”.

 Spyware Hints

The information in this edition is slightly dated, as I originally wrote it about six months ago and due to some odd circumstances it was not used. The article is still informative and useful but not quite as timely as it could be. Please bear with me this month and hopefully next month we will have something a bit fresher.

This month we will look at a quickly growing concern, spyware. First, let’s define spyware and the differences between it and adware. I would define spyware as a piece of software that collects personal information about you or your habits and reports this info back to its parent company. Adware on the other hand is software that forces you to view ads while you use it. Adware is usually harmless and is a pretty decent way for many companies to get a little revenue out of an otherwise freely offered program. The web has quite a few “free” programs available and you have to realize that somebody put work into those programs and if you find the program useful they deserve to be getting some sort of payment or they will stop writing these programs. Spyware, while generally not illegal, is certainly ethically questionable, and sometimes outright deceitful.

There are quite a few groups out there watching for spyware and trying to keep people informed of new instances as they arise. I will talk about two of the worst offenders here as I could go for quite awhile and frankly, that would get pretty boring.

The first program to talk about is Gator. This program sneaks in with other software and usually the user does not even know they're getting the spyware. At installation, if you were lucky, there was a whole page dedicated to Gator and whether you were going to allow it to install. In other instances, there might be a check box hidden  at the bottom of the End User License Agreement (EULA). And finally, there might not be an option or even a warning that it's being installed. Gator’s job is to monitor the pages that you visit and report back what they are. Then the parent company sends back a pop-up ad based on your viewing.

The other program I want to tell you know about is Kazaa. It started as a file sharing service and has grown into a sort of desktop web portal. The major disaster that goes along with this program however, is buried in the EULA and by agreeing to it, you allow the program to do a form of distributed computing. The network it connects to will also store data on your hard drive and may use your computer to send spam. It hides these activities on a non-DOS partition it creates on your hard drive. Since Windows can’t see the partition, this process is virtually invisible to the user.

So what can you do? There are several programs available to detect and remove spyware. Spybot recently came to my attention and I have been using it with good success. The program is freeware and has good documentation available on the web. The program is available at http://www.safer-networking.org/. The one we used to use is also freeware, Ad-aware by Lavasoft and is available here: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/. While you're there get the RefUpdate program also. This program retrieves the latest database reference for Ad-aware. When installing RefUpdate be sure to have it install in the SAME directory that Ad-aware is using, otherwise it does not work. You run Ad-aware much like a virus scanner and it checks your memory and hard drives for known spyware. It then presents you with a list and you can check the box next to any that you want removed. WARNING: If the program is one that you still wish to use, such as Comet Cursor, you may consider leaving it in place and not worrying about it. The program also has a backup function so that you can undo changes made by Ad-aware if they turn out to be not to your liking.

Finally, another good defense against spyware and several other nasty surprises is ZoneAlarm, a free program which acts as a firewall to stop hacker attacks and also will not allow programs access to the web without asking you first. There are several other firewall programs available, but as far as I know, ZoneAlarm is the only one that allows you to control other programs access to the web from your computer.

If you have questions or comments, I will attempt to address them as time permits or if you have an idea for future topics, please email me at techhubby@divinediva.org .