The Haus

Sunday, July 25, 2004

CWS: Welcome to Hell -- 12:09 pm CST, Update by The Master

I met one of the most insidious little parasites of the computer world on Friday. It is called CoolWebSearch. This thing is absolutely awful. It infects your IE browser, turning it into an ad machine for porn and other spammed ad-crap. Here's a couple tips for anyone with this bug:

If you're running Linux or BSD, you have no problems. Maybe this is a good reason to switch?
If you're running Internet Explorer, and are not willing to switch, run Windows Update, constantly. If you're on XP, just turn the auto-updates on. If you're using an illegal copy of XP, then I guess you're hosed. The other option is to completely remove Microsoft's version of Java, since that's how it gets in.
There are several sites online offering a program called CWShredder. It will work on most versions of CWS, but it works best if you boot to safe mode first. Otherwise, it will just reinfect the machine immediately after removal. Please note, the author of CWShredder has been blasted off the internet by DOS attacks since last month. The authors of CWS are very serious about their adware.

This is giving me a whole lot of reasons to either switch to Firefox, or switch to Linux. Maybe when A.T. gets back into town I'll ask him to put up an article on switching for gamers.

J.t.Qbe comments: In my department we have have a word for IE users: "targets". Mozilla is the way to go if you want to keep your computer crapware-free.

News for 07/25/2004

Recent Headlines

January 5, 2015: It Returns!
August 10, 2007: SCO SUCKS IT DOWN!
July 5, 2007: Slackware 12.0 Released
May 20, 2007: PhpBB 3.0 RC 1 Released
February 2, 2007: DOOM3 1.31 Patch

January 27, 2007: Join the World Community Grid
January 17, 2007: Flash Player 9 for Linux
December 30, 2006: Darkness over Daggerford 1.2
December 19, 2006: Pocket Tunes 4.0 Released
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