I may be a bit drunk, but isn't this just a bit disturbing?

You see, for a laugh, and to see what all the fuss was about, I decided to download this thing called Kazaa. And, look - here's a link, so that you can do the same. But don't do that, unless you really don't like your computer. This software, and it's cohorts, are like this horrible collection of electronic parasites, diseases and infections. Stay well clear.

I installed kazaa and a few seconds later, noticed a significant deteriation in the performance of my computer. Put simply, everything slowed down. Now, I run Windows 2000 within an emulator, completely set apart from the rest of my computer, so if Windows crashes, goes a bit crazy, falls prey to a virus, or whatever, it shouldn't bother the rest of my machine. Linux doesn't care whether that particular process runs or aborts - it's all the same. But Kazaa, using up most of the resources alotted to it, actually managed to impact on the host operating system. The host OS, kind of stirred a bit, and muttered, "What? 256MB of memory not enough? Tough sh*t. Take it or leave it." But, erm . . . well, I'm trying to use Opera, just downloading some codecs or whatever and there's VMWare, probably wondering what the hell is going on, and I think everything is going a bit too slowly for my liking. Well, after trying out Kazaa for a while, realising is wasn't really for me, I decide to uninstall this thing. No, actually . . . first, I thought I'd do a quick check for this so-called 'Spyware' that I've heard so much about. So, erm . . . yeah. Where was I? Yeah, I remember. So, I find someone making available for free download some software to detect and remove spyware from your computer. It's here if you want it. So, I download and install this software, get it going and sit back and wait. And it finds stuff, loads of stuff, loads of this spyware stuff installed on my computer, watching me, observing which web-sites I go to and whatever. Creepy, eh? As it happens, and as I said before, Windows is only a guest on my machine, and I do all my web-browsing on the host operating system, Linux, so that any spyware running on the Windows machine wouldn't really get much information out of me, but that's beside(s?!) the point. The fact is, this spyware has installed itself there without my knowledge. And I notice the name Cydoor popping up a lot, hence the link at the top of this entry. But when I go to www.cydoor.com, I get this:

HTTP/1.1 New Session Failed

What the hell?!

Dr Myles Allen, who took part in the project, said the aim was to enlist the help of up to two million desk top computers. A test run in a number of centres around the world startled the scientists by predicting a possible "super-ice age". But Dr Allen said it would be wrong to get excited about the data at this stage. (from netscape)

Oh, I see, here it is on Ananova. Right, it all makes sense now.

So I did a scan for 'pests' (spyware), using this thing called PestControl, which, being an evaluation copy, would only point out the existence of these 'pests' and not actually take action. However, in doing so, I was given all the information I needed . . . location of 'pest' and what action to take. PestControl found 107 items of 'spyware' installed on my Windows 2000 machine. 107. No wonder the poor thing was running so slowly.

So, for those reading this thinking, "Oh, so it's just geeky computer stuff he's going on about today," then, erm . . . well, yeah, I am, but it's these people I'm writing for today . . . I wouldn't imagine the average person would have much idea about the existence of this so-called 'spyware' stuff being installed on their machine . . . I mean, I didn't until recently. It's crazy sh*t, man.

Later that day . . .

So, we had this steak for dinner, which had been marinated in soy sauce, chillies, honey, garlic (which Robyn Hitchcock just mentioned in his lyrics . . . Mexican God?) and . . . maybe that was it. We had that with chips and salad (lettuce, cherry tomatoes, lemon juice, toasted sunflower seeds, pepper) and some garlic bread to start. Very nice. Washed down with hot toddies (?! sp? basically boiling (or near) water, honey (again), lemon (M**** has a cold, you see) and whiskey). Why am I talking about dinner? I'm sure I had a point to make . . . nah, it's gone again.

The google searches continue . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/talktime/story/0,13274,1030232,00.html

The 'lite' version I had trouble obtaining, but it seems the better option, at least if you want access to the 'Kazaa' community but without the incessant pop-ups and activity (internet-related) monitoring:

KazaaLite download

But, really, why not just use WinMX?