Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Hackers jump on newest IE7 bug

Once again users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser are exposed to hackers. Most hackers target IE because of its widespread use. This article is from ComputerWorld today and can be found at this link.

I have IE7 installed on only one machine, and that is because I need to have a machine for understanding what you folks are up against. I have IE6 installed on my other machines, and have long recommended against all of you installing IE7. I have even included a post somewhere below this one that instructs on how to remove IE7 and return to IE6.

Still, I recommend against any of you using IE at all, whether IE7 or IE6, except in those cases where it may be required.

I recommend the Firefox browser, but there is nothing wrong with Netscape or Safari. All three are fine browsers and are a lot safer than any version of Internet Explorer.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Lavasoft AdAware

I have rarely run AdAware in the past few months, but thought I'd give it a try the other day just to see if it might find something the others didn't.  In the process of updating the definitions file (I thought), Lavasoft downloaded a new version of the program which was, as I recall, The Anniversary Edition, or something like that. It was still free, but I found the user interface to be even more complex than AdAware had been, and it never was the best. I ran it and it found several very trivial files it recommended I not bother deleting. Strange. I interpreted this to mean that they found nothing, but felt  they had to say something after taking up so much of my time. Ridiculous.

Bottom line, I have uninstalled Lavasoft AdAware and will not use it again. There is simply no need to use this superfluous product when my top three spyware products are all free and do a better job.  Actually, a far better job.