Your computer, you should have total control over it.

[buckeye68]

Hoyl [censored] the new adaware se blew my mind. I run the old adaware, nortons, spybot, cwshredder, and spyware blaster on a reg basis but the new AdawareSE just removed 858 programs, files or whatever the [censored] you call them. Who ever posted the new program update thanks a ton

[BrutusMaximus]

Norton 2005 has spyware/adware removal stuff in it now, and it works surprisingly well. If you guys have serious probs with browser hijacks and such, might wanna switch to Mozilla Firefox, works nice.....I am still too much of an IE fan myself. Thank god I am the only one who uses my computers.

[Hodge]

Firefox is built to prevent spyware and viruses, that and most of the malicious scripts are written to execute in IE. I have been using Firefox for awhile now and noticed a drop in spyware. (I never had a problem with spyware before, just a few tracking cookies every now and then, but now with Firefox there is nothing.)

[kenlin]

make sure you update your spyware software. could be that it's not finding any cookies because it doesn't know where to look for firefox.

[Hodge]

Originally Posted by kenlin

make sure you update your spyware software. could be that it's not finding any cookies because it doesn't know where to look for firefox.

Uhh, nope. Firefox doesn't allow as many spyware/trojans through because it's designed with that purpose in mind, and it has a little help in part that most spyware/trojans are scripted to use IE holes. It has absolutely nothing to do with Ad-aware, etc. not looking in the right places.

[Clarity]

Wanted to recommend something else I've been using.

It's call KeePass, and it both generates and securely saves passwords for basically any purpose. Many of us will use one password on many different sites. Some even will use the same password everywhere, creating a real danger when user accounts on a forum¹ and online banking accounts are accessed with the same information. KeePass will also generate passwords for you. I'm using them everywhere, different passwords at every different place I visit, and they're all ridiculously complicated. But as I just double click on the entry in KeePass and it temporarily puts the password in a state where I can just right click and paste into any field, I never have to remember what they are. Which is good, because here's an example of one of those passwords²;

jeÿÌ¡ï`Pn:——ß»‹¢ëžŸæ0ÈLäÃ*£8â €°Ã�Â4Âå/*µÞèë€"zÂ.BÅ*R8Mg0__Å*ÚS<µ3·»Û

Good luck trying to randomly hit that one (it's 508 bits³ for anyone who knows what that means). Or even using a supercomputer to sequentially break it. I mean, lol, I don't really have much to hide, but in this day and age, I can go from typing this message, to moving money between accounts (which would be a sad exercise at present), to paying a bill, buying a book, checking personal medical history, etc. The point being that, even if you don't have much to protect, you might as well do a good job securing your life and movements online.

Before I scare anyone, that was an extreme password example. You could just as easily have it generate something of 8 characters, made up of just lower and upper-case letters, numbers, and basic symbols. Something like;

s6:ay$D(

That's 53 bits. Very secure. Less scary looking. You could even memorize those. I have about a dozen of them permanently engrained on my brain from past use, and would use those as a more secure alternative when I didn't use (and now I'm giving away old password habits, but it doesn't really matter) my rifle numbers from Parris Island and Camp LeJeune, or pistol number from Kaneohe Bay, which are only 24 bit in strength. Not so secure. Particularly since I used and re-used these everywhere for many years.

Also, it's worth saying that you don't have to have KeePass generate passwords for you, you could enter your own, I just prefer the random chaos of the ones it makes.

KeePass (which I always pronounce "Keep Ass", because I have the comedic maturity level of a 5th grader sometimes) makes it all quick and easy. And I like quick and easy. If you download and use it, you might stare at it at first wondering what the hell it's supposed to do for you. But once you get in there, and start creating entries for site access, you'll start changing passwords all around. As a rule of thumb, I create as complicated a password as the given site will allow.

As stated numerous times before, I am not terribly tech-minded, so even if you think yourself largely pc-illiterate, you will be able to use this software.

It's open source, and entirely free.


KeePass Password Safe
http://keepass.sourceforge.net/

From their website;
"What is KeePass?
Today you need to remember many passwords. You need a password for the Windows network logon, your e-mail account, your homepage's ftp password, online passwords (like CodeProject member account), etc. etc. etc. The list is endless. Also, you should use different passwords for each account. Because if you use only one password everywhere and someone gets this password you have a problem... A serious problem. The thief would have access to your e-mail account, homepage, etc. Unimaginable.

KeePass is a free/open-source password manager or safe which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key-disk. So you only have to remember one single master password or insert the key-disk to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish)."


¹ - Your passwords on Buckeyeplanet are encrypted in the database. Even as an admin, I can not access them. Not via the admin control panel, not from the database directly. I (alone, as no one else has access to my private machine) could get to the entry in the mySQL database (lol, if I knew how) and see the encypted entry that stores your password, but wouldn't be able to make any sense of it. It would be like trying to read a PGP-encrypted email. Security and privacy is important to me, and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. This is also why I have the inability (for those in the past who have written hoping I can) to remind people what their password is. I can reset it to something temporary for you, then you'd have to privately create a new one, but I can't tell you what yours is.

² - I had KeePass generate this for me at the time of this posting, for the sake of this posting, with some basic settings. So don't bother trying to log in as me with it, lol.

³ - To put that in perspective, we were generated passwords around 53-bit strength when working on DoD computers in ultra-secure SCIFs for NSA/SIGINT purposes. That was early 90's, I'm sure they use something stronger now (although 53 is pretty damn secure itself), but the point is that 508-bit is almost funny. Overkill, but overkill isn't a bad thing in this case. I mean, if you don't have to memorize it, then who cares how insanely complicated it is? Although, that's easy for me to say, because I'll just be using one computer. For those of you who access the net from, say, one or two PCs from home, one at work, maybe different ones on the road now and again, you probably would prefer something smaller (like the 53-bit example above.) Something more portable, but still safe. Anyway, I'm way off topic now, I just wanted to recommend the software.

[Alan]

ok.....help....

i inherited this dell dimension from a friend a couple of weeks ago to take the load of my laptop.....

well....this thing is virus riddled.....

every day i run adaware, hijackthis, ravantivirus and use zonelabs when on-line.......yet every day when i turn the damn thing back on....all of the viruses and [censored] return....

whats up with that? should i take a sledgehammer to the thing and go back to my laptop? windows 2000

[Thump]

I just downloaded the New Ad-Aware SE. I ran the old Ad Aware before I downloaded the new one and it found 0 new objects.

The new Ad-Aware found 173.

Thanks for the info. fellas.