Tech Musings: Ad Aware ....a manna from heaven...........

Musings

Is Ignorance Bliss?

I wasn’t feeling too well this evening. I’ll sleep early, I told myself, I had been sleeping at 2 am every day for the last month or so and I looked forward to an “early to bed, late to rise” night. But it was not to be.

Whilst surfing the net – it started very innocuously at Tucows.com – I learned of a program called “Spyware Doctor”. It has been given a 5 star rating at Tucows and is decribed as “Award-winning spyware removal, protects against spyware, adware, Trojans, keyloggers and spybots”.

I use Ad-Aware. Have been using it as long as I can remember. But why not flirt with another software? I thought to myself. Maybe I’ll even take the good Spyware Doctor to bed! And so the software (size: 3.9 MB) was downloaded.

Ad-Aware is a nice old lady. She has class. She breaks the news of spyware gently. Most of what she finds is rated as “low risk”. I have yet to come across a “high risk” situation with her.

The good lady doctor on the other hand is very different. She screams that there are 155 different “infections” at the top of her voice. One is alarmed. One, in the heat of the moment, tends to jump to ones feet and issue orders crisply to curb the damn invasion of the small little bytes from Mars.

The good doctor springs to action and after a while announces efficiently, briskly, in a self-satisfied tone that the offending infections are gone. Reboot the system, she says over her shoulder, as she leaves.

Oh God, I lament to myself. I forgot to tell the good lady that while she was busy, whiles she wasn’t looking, I have been busy myself……….. philandering. I was away at a Warez site looking for a crack (no pun intended) and found a nice, hot, wet, moist, pleasing crack! I applied myself to the crack and it yielded! The good lady’s virginity has been despoiled by this crack!

Anyway, I decide to keep the secret to myself. No one will know, I tell myself. I surreptitiously apply the crack.

I reboot,

As the system is booting up, a horrendously, hideously colourful screen springs to view. It is a spyware; a malware of epic proportions. That silly hot, wet, moist, pleasant crack seems to have sprung infections galore on my unsuspecting PC and here is this hideous screen sneering in my face!

It takes an effort to keep the wits calm and composed. It’s almost as if one’s one wife is being sullied by a stranger in one’s presence. It takes tremendous composure, tremendous grit not to panic.

A little background check reveals that the stranger can be vanquished with a software known as Bazooka (Visions of a GI, armed to the teeth with night vision goggles spring to mind. Bazooka turns out to be anything but. It is a small sparrow of a GI…….a nerd of a GI if you like. It is a piddly 1.37 MB light but it packs a mean punch. In less than 5 seconds it scans my entire hard drive and tells me that while I have may have an STD, I definitely don’t have AIDS. In other words, I’ll live to screw my hard disk for as long as I like.

The infidels are Aureate Radiate. B and XXX Toolbar, it tells me. How did I get XXX Toolbar? I’d rather not say. Don’t ask.

A little further checking reveals that Aureate Radiate.B can actually be uninstalled. Yes, that’s tight uninstalled! So I uninstall her.

The other bitch poses as a regular under one or several of the following names: advert.dll, ipcclient.dll, tfdc.dll or adimage.dll. Tricky tart, ain’t she? She’s actually in residence in Hotel Windows!

I scan the disk. In DOS. I find her much faster.

Thar she blows! In the c:\windows\system32 folder!

Before she can say “Take me to bed!” she has been decapitated.

I wake up good ole’ bazooka and say “Hey buddy, do another scan!”. He does. “All clear on the western front” he sleepily announces and then heads back to bed.

“See!” I tell faithful old, wrinkled, heavily used Ad-Aware. “Bazooka says that all’s quiet on the western front”.

Ad Aware smiles enigmatically. She takes out a special tool box, one she reserves for special occasions. She does a system scan. She finds four adware / spyware.

“Come her, sonny!” she orders. I trot to her, meek as a lamb.

“Trust none of these fancy dudes” she cautions me. Well, maybe, bazooka” she relents “but certainly not that fancy doctor lady! Maybe she planted a few infection of her own while she was at it”.

The logic makes sense. Who knows what the good lady doctor was doing behind my back! Maybe she was sleeping with anything that moved! That would explain the infections.

I look sheepish: I look crestfallen: I look contrite; I look confused.

“Come to Mama” Ad-Aware whispers and she hugs me to her bosom in a motherly embrace.

Summary: Don’t trust none of that fancy white trash, dudes. There’s a war out there on the spyware, malware front and one doesn’t know whom to trust.

Ad Aware is the mama from heaven. Oooops…………manna from heaven I meant.