New Microsoft Anti-Spyware Tool

Free DL (beta), free updates, Anti-Spyware network, cleans BHO's, more... it found things on my PC that SpyBot nor Pest Patrol found. Interesting technology, check it out:

-- "Perseverance, and perseverance alone, is omnipotent." MCJ 1998

Linux has had a lot of growing pains in the area of software installation as well. Back when PC programs were just a 'sub-directory full of data files and executables,' (something that Linux was up until a few years ago), a lot more of them could be run by 'regular' users than the mess we have now.

I personally despise software that uses ITS OWN set of user name/password/privilege management routines rather than simply using what Windows has built-in.

Umm, while I'd probably agree that -- in general -- there are a lot of poorly configured/vulnerable Windows machines out there, I've seen plenty of professionally done Windows installations where the machines are both (1) usable and (2) stable. Many (but perhaps not all :-) ) college campuses would be a good example; there are a LOT more kids out there who'll be trying to hack the local campus Windows machines than the UNIX boxes.

Keep in mind which OS Kevin Mitnick's worm ran on, eh?

Note that the EULA tells you it will report information back to Microsoft, and the URL it gives you for information on disabling that feature does NOT give you any information on how to turn off the "Reporting Component".

I declined the update for that reason.

Thanks for posting this. I downloaded and ran it and a trojan downloader was detected and removed. This downloader was rated as a severe threat. I regularly use spybot and was surprised by this result.

Bullshit. Come over to my machine and send me an email from the guest account. It's IP is 24.8.38.146. You won't because I don't have enough holes for you to find one to creep in.

As a user, a .kde script can't modify the system. You really should learn some technology that has come since the 60's. Pretty wonderfull stuff.

Perhaps Microsoft should give a further nudge in this direction, but the real problem is application software that is written to require you to be Administrator. There's an amazing amount of it, and it bothers me, because I *don't* run as Administrator by default.

What windows has built in is to turn off all checks and to allow the user, and any program the user or the user's programs may have spawned to do anything to the any part of the system software.

when was that? How many non-windows worms are running around in the wild right now? Zero.

How many windows worms running around right now? countless.

I used to think this as well, but over time the registry's grown on me. Why is it any different to keep various program settings, user settings, etc. in a central databse (that's fully hierarchical, secure, expandable, etc.) than it is to keep all those settings spread all over your hard drive in many different directories? By having everything in the registry, you eliminate a lot of work for programmers who often wouldn't have the time to implement something similar with anywhere near as much flexibility or security.

I would grant you that it makes moving program settings a little harder than, e.g., the old 'INI' approach. (Too bad it's an uncommon program that has a 'export user settings to file' option...).

But it's still a LOT better than ten million '.fooRC' files running around a user's home directory!

OK, adimssino #2 is that, yeah, there's still plenty of poor software out there that does that, but Microsoft has been pushing developers for OVER A DECADE now to keep data files in 'My Documents,' and there's been a great improvement in that period.

In *NIX, of course, usually an application didn't have a choice... it was ~user or /tmp or you didn't have any write permissions! :-)

---Joel

This is true for any program when the account connected to it is an administrator/super user/etc...

I suspect that the percentage of Linux users who do their 'daily work' with an administrator's account is not that much less than the number of Windows users who do so... In fact, it might even be higher, if only because there are so many millions of Windows users out there who are not developers/IT/engineers/etc. for their jobs and these folks will typically only have 'normal user' accounts per their IT department's security policies... (Where Linux isn't on very many 'low level business users' desktops yet.)

---Joel

They indeed sell us old technology as new invention of theirs. Then this talk of Billy about intellectual property and such ... The track record is not really in favour of theirs what security concerns.

Rene

I had a older version of explorer.exe form a previous version of windows, and this microsoft stuff flagged it as torjan ftp service. LOL

It works, maybe too well tho.

Keep on dreaming. If a Linux user has access to the network, the user can run a piece of software, spyware or other malware. By starting this piece of software from an auto start configuration file (can be anything from .profile to a kde initialisation file) you have the same effect as you have under Windows. The weak link is the user, not the OS.

If you the log out and log in as a different user, the system works normally again for that user. The bulk of the system is protected from the users. Restoring the troubled user to normal is as easy as removing the offending software while logged in on a different account. Unlike Windows you don't have to try to fix the system with the malware running.

You can also lock the .profile and KDE files up tight if you really want to.

windows,

M$ bought a company[1], tweaked their product so that it would give false positives on P2P software (Microsoft DRM anyone?), and crippled it so that it wouldn't work on older versions of Windows.

As soon as all the guinea pigs have helped them debubug it (the first one is always free--just like dope), expect The Borg to start charging for it. First they create the problems, then they charge you more to fix it.

The following heading was removed from giantcompany.com 3 days ago. (A similar heading is still on their site, but it points to nothing and the original text has been removed.)

How is the GIANT AntiSpyware product that I purchased different from the free beta version that Microsoft will be introducing?

The Microsoft anti-spyware beta product will not support Windows 98SE / ME / NT (with SP 3, 4, or 6a). http://216.239.63.104/search?q=cache:5GuF9kHAlrwJ:

More caches:

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 15:45:16 -0500, Mark Jones wroth:

I wonder if it finds the spy/adware that comes with Microsoft operating systems and applications.

It took me a week using several third-party cleaners to remove the junk from a clean, default, installation of XP home edition. When I first let XP connect to my ISP after the installation, every damned MS application on my machine fought with each other to get bandwidth.

Jim

On 12 Jan 2005 16:42:04 -0800, snipped-for-privacy@larwe.com wroth:

Did you expect anything else from "big brother"?

Thanks for the warning. I was almost tempted to try it.

Jim