Have you read this article by Joseph Menn?
This is one of the reasons I'm glad I had my IT guy make me a computer rather than buying one off the shelf.
I have an external router.....that helps. I very rarely get popups or intrusive ads linked to my email.
M
Sunday, January 16, 2005, 12:00 A.M. Pacific
Plugging out: next wave for PC users?
By Joseph Menn
Los Angeles Times
Stephen Seemayer had the first Pong video-game system on his block. A decade later, the Los Angeles artist was the first of his neighbors to get a personal computer. And in 1996, he was so inspired by the World Wide Web that he created a series of small paintings for viewing over the Internet.
Now Seemayer, 50, is once again on the cutting edge: Sick of spam clogging his in-box and spyware and viruses crashing his system, Seemayer yanked out his high-speed connection.
"I'm not going to pay for something that I can't use," he said.
A small but growing number of frustrated computer owners are coming to the same conclusion. They're giving up or cutting back their use of the Internet, especially at home, where no corporate tech-support team will ride to their rescue.
Instead of making life easier — the essential promise of technologies since the steam engine — the home PC of late has made some users feel stupid, endangered or just hassled beyond reason.
Seemayer's machine, for instance, got so jammed with spam that he stopped checking e-mail. When he surfed the Web, pop-up ads from a piece of spyware he couldn't wipe out spewed sexually explicit images and used so much computing power that the PC would just stop.
So when his son left for college in September, Seemayer finally unplugged.
Now when he uses his computer, it's to compose letters or organize photos — anything that doesn't require interaction with any other system.
Seemayer is still in the minority; overall Internet use continues to grow.
Anger is growing
But 2004 "was a real turning point in a bad direction," said technology analyst Ted Schadler of Forrester Research. "People are getting really angry. They're angry at Dell and Microsoft and their cable providers, and that's appropriate. They should be."
In a recent survey, 31 percent of online shoppers said they were buying less than before because of security issues. And although more people are signing up for high-speed, commerce-friendly connections, the proportion of U.S. Internet users paying for things online barely budged in 2004 from a year earlier. It rose to 27 percent from 26 percent in 2003 after jumping from 20 percent the previous year, according to Harris Interactive.
For many users, spyware was the last straw. During the past 18 months, the sneaky programs have soared to the top of the list of tech woes, triggering the most tech-support calls to Dell, the nation's top PC maker. Spyware lurks on as many as 80 percent of computers nationwide, according to the National Cyber Security Alliance, a trade group.
Spyware generally transmits information to third parties and sometimes takes control of a PC, usually to display ads. The most pernicious varieties have instructed millions of computers to make expensive toll calls or logged every keystroke on affected machines, sending account numbers and passwords to identity thieves.
The aggravation level has reached the point that some people in the computer industry believe it threatens to undermine advances of the past decade, during which the Internet has grown from a virtually empty domain to a global community of 800 million souls. They say they need to act before the same early adopters who led mainstream Americans online lead them off.
It may well be up to private enterprise. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are exploring a crackdown on spyware, but government efforts to stop another online scourge, spam, have had limited results.
The threats have evolved from minor annoyances to serious computer risks.
A computer owner for seven years, Peggy Kasul of Grand Rapids, Mich., did a little shopping online. Her husband used the machine to help manage some rental property, and her 16-year-old daughter wrote term papers for school.
Then her daughter went on the Internet to research a paper on the issue of breast-feeding in public. As if she had typed in a magic word, spyware ads for porn sites popped up and wouldn't go away.
Soon the computer was unusable. It took more than three weeks and $300 to get the thing working again, by which time all the family's data had been wiped out. Now Kasul sends her daughter to use the computers at school or the library.
"I don't do much shopping online anymore, because that scares me," Kasul said. "I go to the store."
The biggest factor behind the rapid increase in spyware is the amount of money at stake. Blue-chip companies including Motorola, Verizon and JP Morgan use it, along with thousands of others.
The businesses most often accused of distributing spyware, including privately held Claria, WhenU and 180Solutions, say they are providing legitimate services to customers who approved the installation. But their disclosures are often misleading or buried: A recent Claria license ran for more than 60 electronic pages, first mentioning the phrase "pop-up" on page 18. Some 180Solutions programs have been installed through Microsoft security holes. And out of 100 million WhenU installations, 80 million have been removed, a company executive said.
Much spyware arrives bundled with programs such as screensavers and file-sharing software.
Staying safe complicated
The defenses remain scattered. Windows PCs often don't come with anti-virus software installed. Firewalls and spam blockers are usually separate too, and there are dozens of small companies offering what they describe as anti-spyware products — some of which actually install spyware.
"Staying safe online has gotten too complicated for the average user to do by buying individual products and making them work together," America Online spokesman Andrew Weinstein said.
Realizing that such fragmentation is making matters worse, some companies are rounding up the pieces of a more complete resistance.
Microsoft recently bought an anti-virus company and an anti-spyware software maker. Time Warner's latest version of AOL checks for spyware and offers to delete it. And where Dell's online guide for configuring a PC used to suggest a combined anti-virus and firewall program without saying why, it now explicitly warns buyers to protect themselves or face potentially costly problems in the future.
Legislation that would have required more direct warnings by spyware companies to consumers and ensured that users could delete the programs made headway in the last session of Congress, despite objections from top computer-security company Symantec and other software providers. Ari Schwartz, an anti-spyware lobbyist with the Center for Democracy and Technology, put the odds of some legislation passing in 2005 at better than 80 percent.
If things get worse, Seemayer probably won't be the only one on his block with a PC cut off from the Internet.
"It's great for anything you can do on your own," he said. "It seems to me an incredible typewriter, and that's it."
seattletimes.nwsource.com |
