As I've mentioned in the past, the husband is a talented guy. One of
his many computer related talents is the cleaning and restoring of
computers their owners have thought were possibly done for. He's
managed to get quite a few back up and running. Most of the time these
computers crash because of their owner's idiotic surfing behavior. One
friend's laptop would not boot up...at all. He didn't know what the
problem was, but before he went out and spent a boatload of moolah on a
new computer, he gave the husband a whack at fixing it. The husband,
after many frustrating hours, was able to get it back up and running.
The friend was amazed and wanted to know what the problem was. The
husband was blunt: "Your wife has been filling out online surveys and
the computer was completely overrun with data mining cookies as a
result." I'm assuming most people know what Ad-Aware is, but just in
case, it's a free program (you can download it here)
that cleans out data mining cookies that the IE "Tools" option doesn't
remove. The most cookies the husband has ever had Ad-Aware delete
before that was three hundred. The friend had 1200 data mining
cookies on his laptop. A new record was set: so many cookies had been
surreptitiously inserted that they had completely boggled the computer
they were intending to derive information from.
Suffice it to say, after a "friendly" chat with the husband, the
friend's wife no longer fills out any online surveys. Ad-Aware was the
latest and greatest tool for a long period of time. The only problem
with it? Well, as throrough as it is, it even misses stuff. This
summer, the husband loaded Spybot---the newest spyware detector---onto
my computer, but didn't set it up to run actively. Well, after having
few problems with data mining cookies because I'm just not that active
of a surfer, I got nailed. Wee bastard wasn't running properly and the
husband decided to take a look under the hood, so to speak. He ran
Ad-Aware and while he found only seven or eight cookies, they were the
nasty ones. He then set Spybot to run actively and I'm completely
dumbfounded by all that it's found. You see, it sends you a little
notification every time you hit a webpage and some anonymous bot tries
to insert a data mining cookie onto your computer. What's surprising
about all this is that the majority of notifications I receive are when
I'm trying to access a story from my Yahoo homepage. Or The Washington Post. Or The New York Times.
Or any number of other mainstream media sources. These are the places I
go to most on the web: I didn't know they were also the sites that
inserted the most data mining cookies onto my computer. To be fair
about it: I don't believe this is some MSM conspiracy. The husband
believes it's the ads these sites host that are trying to do the deed
and that, most likely, the site's administrators have no clue about all
of this. But still...it's shocking. While I really don't know much
about these matters, well, I'm going to go out on a limb and recommend
that everyone download Spybot onto your computer, if you haven't
already. You can find it here.
Besides sending notifications, it clears off the spyware Ad-Aware can't
find. I realize it shouldn't be a pain to keep these things off your
hard drive. I completely agree with that statement, but unfortunately
that's not the world we live in. It's a lot of work, I know. And it's
time consuming, but you could ignore this and wonder why, like the
friend I wrote about above, your computer will no longer run. It's up
to you.