USATODAY.com – When cookies aren’t monsters and spyware isn’t spyware

Anonymous Patron writes “Andrew Kantor’s Column at the USAToday this week takes a good look at Cookies and Spyware. Spyware, at least for the moment, can be clearly defined: It’s malicious software put onto a computer without the user’s knowledge and consent. Once there, it tracks some aspect of her usage and reports it to someone else. A cookie is a small piece of information a Web site puts on your computer. It’s just a string of characters that identifies you to the site, something like an account number. There’s no personal information in it; it’s just an identifier.

He says don’t confuse the 2.”

February 1, 2005 by Uncategorized 1

You may also like...

1 Response

  1. kylere says:
    February 1, 2005 at 7:38 pm

    Thought
    I would suggest caution, this article is a feel good comp article, and while I highly doubt anyone had 900 DIFFERENT pieces of spyware apps, it is likely she had 300-500 cookies and 70 spyware/adware packages. The trick is that Ad-Aware (www.lavasoftusa.com) along with Spybot Search and Destroy (www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html) (I mention those two pieces of software because in concert they can remove 99.999% of any problems you may have as relates to Ad and Spyware) report all the individual pieces, such as each file, each registry entry etc. So one Spyware app, such as those installed with WeatherBug or Kazaa can count as 50 entries.

    Do not let this reporter trivilize the issue, Spyware and Adware are THE tech issue of the year, the majority of computer problems people are having right now are related to them.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

LISNews Archives