A Web of Spies

By Jerry Pournelle

June 28, 2004

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Spyware

The other night at the opera our dinner guests, lawyer and management consultant, both complained that their computers had slowed to a crawl and they were getting a million unwanted popup advertisements, often for sex toys and other embarrassing things. Since their daughter is graduating from Yale this year, it wasn't a crucial embarrassment, but it was very annoying.

"Ad-Aware," I said. "Google to find Ad-Aware, download that, run it, and tell me the result."

That was a Thursday, opening night of Il Trovotore, with what I thought were new sets but the Los Angeles Times says we've seen them before. Good production, moved fast, no pauses for set changes. They left the rather pointless ballet in, but it was staged well, and I like ballet in opera, although I gather I am in a distinct minority on that. Anyway, we saw our friends at church Sunday, and they were effusive in their gratitude. They each found something like 25 unwanted running processes, over 100 registry keys, and another hundred or so data mining or tracking programs. Ad-Aware eliminated them all.

"It's like we have new machines," Sally said. I can well believe it. The first time we ran Ad-Aware on my wife's machine, the results were similar. A good half the computer cycles were eaten with unwanted tracking processes, and she couldn't go to the Internet without getting dozens of advertisements, some for the most anatomically amazing stuff. Ad-Aware halved the time it took to compile her reading program, and was even more effective in speeding up Internet access and browsing.

So what's going on here? What are these programs, how do they get on your machines, and do they do you any good?

From http://www.spychecker.com/spyware.html, which is as good a source of information as any:

"Spyware is Internet jargon for Advertising Supported software (Adware).

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