OT: Any way to forget Gator?

[BBegemott]

I have no more patience to fight those dataminers (Gator, Claria, Sydoor [sp?] and others) any more. Whatever i do, they get themselves installed on my PC. I remove them with Ad-aware, but it helps permanently only- for a couple of days.
What i am interested in- does anybody know a way to get rid of them once and for ever? How do you deal with them? Let them live in your PC or maybe you have some kind of super-duper utility installed that prohibits all Gator-like activities? Please share your experience. Any input about fighting dataminers is the most welcome.

[Arkcon]

I have never gotten any of them.

I usually surf with Firefox, the newest implematation of Firebird, which was a stripped down Version of Mozilla, which (IIRC) was written by the people who wrote Netscape before AOL made it a mess of bloat code.

Recently, I used IE to check on someone's website here, and continued to surf a bit elsewhere. Sheesh, I was getting tons of port probes, just from using IE. That all went away when I switched back to Firefox.

By the way, I never use P2P networks, and my email is all web-based.

Best of luck.

[Slynky]

I use SpyBot-S&D Here, I think.

It might help out.

Also, here are some specific instructions for removal as found at SARC.

Good luck!

[dogscoff]

install a firewall, like zonealarm, then you can at least stop them from using your internet connection.

[Roanon]

Dont use Internet Explorer. There are tons of better and safer alternatives.

[dogscoff]

But if you don't use IE you can't see my fiction website!! (Due to my crappy javascript)

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
But if you don't use IE you can't see my fiction website!! (Due to my crappy javascript)

Well, at least one Javascript link on your story page worked in Firefox. I only turn on Javascript when I see a webpage needs it, anyways.

Oh, have you noticed yet, I'm a little paranoid about web interfaces.

[ April 10, 2004, 17:19: Message edited by: Arkcon ]

[Baron Munchausen]

I definitely agree that Internet Exploder is not something anyone should be using anymore. Besides Mozilla/Firefox, and its commercialized Version Netscape 7.x, there is also Opera and there are several lesser known browsers becoming more popular. ALL of them are more secure than IE. Even the "MyIE" front end replacement is more secure in some ways, though it still uses the Windows HTML DLLs and so has most of the vulnerabilities of IE.

A firewall is not a bad idea but won't help against Gator and other 'spyware' that loads through web pages. Switching from IE is the best strategy to kill this sort of spyware because only IE supports 'ActiveX' in web pages which is remote execution built into your browser. Yep, IE has insecurity designed in as a feature, not a bug.

Additionally, for real privacy I recommend a 'web filter' that can intercept nasty HTML and Javascript code before your browser even sees it. While Mozilla has internal settings that give you a lot more control over what web pages can do (like an option to simply turn off popups) there is just nothing like being able to write your own scripts to kill advertising banners, neutralize snooping javascript, and alter the appearance of the page if you want.

Get Proxomitron and take control of the web!

www.proxomitron.info

[pathfinder]

Well Baron, there are those of us do not know how to script and don't want to know; what then?

[Baron Munchausen]

It comes with a pretty good set of default filters, and you can get 'customized' sets of filters on the Yahoo group dedicated to Proxomitron. (That's "prox-list" @ Groups.yahoo.com) They have a special set just for Yahoo Groups, for example, that wipes out the advertising and re-arranges the page. The people on this list are on top of the trends in 'counter measures' and will quickly post new filters if new types of ads show up that get around the normal filters.

[ April 10, 2004, 21:09: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]