Friday, December 17, 2004

Big Brother is in your computer

Mike Wendland just lost a weekend to spyware, and the cumulative time most of us have spent to battle it amounts to far more than that. Wendland found 200 different spyware applications on his wife's personal computer, which, naturally, had Microsoft Windows as its operating system. Windows and Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer, are notoriously susceptible to virii and spyware.

Ah, and in related news, Microsoft has bought Giant Company Software, a company that makes software to detect and remove spyware. Is that reason for hope, then? Um, my advice, just use Mozilla's Firefox. As uber-blogger Instapundit could testify, more and more internet users are doing just that. Not only is it lighter and quicker than IE, it's safer as well.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps Firefox is just less prone to spyware purely because it is a smaller target than IE. Firefox will eventually reach a critical mass of users that will make it a target, or it won't, and will only be accessible to the learned few, as it is now.

Samir Chopra said...

I fail to understand Anonymous' comment that Firefox is accessible only to the "learned few". Anyone can use Firefox. You don't need to be an expert to use Firefox.