I've been traveling down to San Francisco a lot lately, for various reasons. When I'm on the road, one of the radio stations that I listen to a lot is the Bay Area outlet of C/NET Radio, a network devoted to computer and IT topics (it's 910 on the AM dial, if you want to give it a try). Among its many features, C/NET reviews software and hardware, and they recently spent some time reviewing software to block pop-up ads and to detect "spyware."
Spyware and Adware
Spyware is the polite name for a kind of hidden software that you unknowingly download while browsing the Web. Once it installs itself on your PC, it tracks your online buying habits and reports its findings to commercial sites. This might result in your getting unsolicited advertising over the Internet, or advertising that is customized for you.
C/NET radio recommended three programs to help you counter pop-up ads and spyware, and they posted their recommendations on their Web site. One of their recommendations was for Ad- Aware 5.6 from LavaSoft. It's freeware for detecting and removing "adware" hidden on your PC; we downloaded it during our April meeting and gave it a quick tryout on Ralph Reid's laptop PC.
To Ralph's surprise, Ad-Aware found six possible spyware or adware programs on his PC, including dssagent.exe, a hidden program from a well-known software publisher, that is alleged to be able to download unsolicited advertisements onto your PC.
Ad-Aware can scan your memory, registry and disk drives for suspected spyware and adware. If it finds any, it gives you some choices about what to do with them. You don't have to be online to run Ad-Aware, and, like a virus checker, you can download the most recent list of suspected spyware and adware definitions from LavaSoft's Web site.
It installed without any problems, and had good help files. We thought that it was a useful tool for anybody that cruises the Web and is concerned about their Internet privacy. Of course, there are other ways to detect spyware and adware; one place to learn more is at Spy Checker.
Ad Blockers
The C/NET review also recommended two commercial programs for blocking pop-up ads and for defeating "Web bugs" (invisible images on a Web page; they report information such as your Internet address to other companies). Since they are commercial programs, we didn't try them; but they did motivate us to check out some freeware and shareware programs for blocking ads.
We downloaded WebWasher 3.0, but discovered that it must be set up as a "proxy server." Normally, your Web browser gets Web pages straight from your ISP's computer on the Internet; your ISP (Internet Service Provider) "serves" the pages to your browser. A proxy server is a program that breaks that direct connection, and acts as a filter between your browser and the ISP.
So, WebWasher would be installed on your PC, and it would filter out the pop-up ads so that your browser would never even see the ads. Sounds good; but the problem is that installing a proxy server on your PC can be tricky. For example, you may have to reconfigure your firewall program to work with a proxy server. Rather than risk messing up Ralph's laptop settings, we didn't go through with WebWasher's installation. Of course, that means that we don't know how hard or easy it would be to use WebWasher. It may be the world's easiest program to set up and use; we just don't know.
Other members have tried other ad blockers without problems; for example, one member is pleased with Pop-Up Stopper, a freeware program that can be downloaded from PC-World.
Something a Little More Down to Earth
All this talk of spyware, adware, proxy servers, firewalls, ad blockers, and Internet privacy can be a bit depressing; so after a while we let our meeting discussion wander off in a more humorous direction: We tracked down some references to "slugbot." I'd heard about slugbot on another radio show (on National Public Radio, not C/NET).
Slugbot is an experimental agricultural robot designed by a team of British scientists. It cruises around on rubber tires at night and uses a long clawed arm, red lights, a video camera, and a lot of software to detect and...squish, basically... slugs.
In the future, slugbot is planned to use a GPS receiver to return to its home base when its slug collection tank is full; at the home base, the dead slugs will decompose and create methane, which will be used to charge up slugbot's batteries so that it can go back out and hunt down more slugs!
If you're interested in slugbot, you might want to search out and download two slugbot articles in .PDF files named ecal01.pdf and eurel00.pdf.
And Something a Little Higher Up
If grubbing in the dirt seemed a bit low, well, we also saw some heavenly sights: we checked out some astronomical charts that showed the current alignment of planets. In late April and the first half of May, you can easily see five planets near each other in the evening sky. The Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has a very nice Web site about it.
Even if you don't read this in time to see the best arrangement of those planets, you can always find good descriptions of the current celestial sights at Harvard.
Upcoming Meetings
We expect to have more door prizes for members at our future meetings; Deane Hillsman and Frank Schick are our two most recent lucky winners. Our next meeting will be held on Wednesday, May 22, at 7:00 p.m. in the large meeting room at the Davis branch of the Yolo County Library. See 'ya!
—
Tim Feldman
