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FREE
OF CHARGE Pop-up
Blockers, Spyware detection, and Anti-Spam software
CCIS customers should be aware of.
POP-UPS,
or undesired advertisements that unexpectedly appear
when accessing seemingly unrelated web sites, are more
than just a nuisance. They can also be carriers of
Spy-Ware (software that monitors your viewing patterns
and reports these to a monitoring firm), or an indication
that your computer already has had this software installed
on it. Ultimately, this unwelcome software will rob
your machine of performance, cause unexplainable 'crashes',
and deprive you of the right to access sites you choose.
Sound
frightening? There is hope! You can tame these
unwelcome intruders with the use of FREE software
that detects their presence on your machine, and
blocks future infections.
Here
are the steps CCIS.net recommends, and links to
FREE software that can help you once again enjoy
your browsing time.
1)
DETECT and REMOVE VIRUSES.
If
You are not already running anti-virus software,
you can almost guarantee there are one of more, possibly
HUNDREDS, of viruses already running on your machine.
While there are numerous commercial products which
come highly recommended, fortunately there are excellent,
FREE products available as well. WARNING: NEVER accept
anti virus or spyware removal software offered to
you as an unsolicited email or Pop-up. In many cases,
the so-called "fixes" are actually themselves disguised
viruses. Pretty sad, huh?
A
highly recommended, FREE Anti-virus suite is available
from Grisoft, and can be downloaded here.
2)
DETECT and REMOVE SPYWARE and ADWARE
Spyware is
software that gathers and reports your viewing habits
without your knowledge. Spyware steal your bandwidth,
and the memory available to your computer, resulting
major loss of performance. Adware goes a
step further, and forces you to visit sites it anticipates
will feature a product you might be interested in,
basically hijacking your browser! Since Spyware/Adware
is usually distributed with little or no
testing,
and installed
on your computer without your consent or knowledge,
it's not at all unusual for Spyware to conflict with
your operating system, or even other spyware, causing
frequent, unexplained, crashes.
A
Spyware detection and removal program, AdAware, available
FREE for personal use, is available
from Lavasoft,
and can be downloaded here.
Since this problem is so pervasive and the technology
so insidious, it is recommended you also check with
a product which specifically targets Spyware, such
as Spybot Search and Destroy (cool name,
eh?) available FREE from this
site.
Remember, once
you've used these programs to detect and remove undesired
software, you should periodically check to make sure
further agents have not been installed on your computer.
Each of these products will check for updated virus
definitions, which allows them to check for
(and remove) viruses that have come out since you
last ran the detection software. 3)
BLOCK POPUPS
POP-ups
are by far the most visible (and annoying!) of the
nuisances listed here, and although they in themselves
are usually not as dangerous as the viruses mentioned
above, they often are carriers of those
packages. One excellent Pop-up blocker that can be
obtained for FREE is provided by
Google, the search people. In addition to blocking
Pop-ups, the toolbar they provide can be a convenient
interface to their search engine, and can also do
neat stuff like auto-filling forms and accessing
news. One note: during the installation process,
Google will ask you if you want to subscribe to their
reporting mechanism. We have not heard of any specific
problems incurred by using this feature, but on principle,
many users prefer to decline this service, easily
done during installation. The Google tool bar
can be obtained here.
4)
ANTI-SPAM
CCIS
has implemented several levels of SPAM (does anyone need
a definition of that?) prevention, many
of which occur before the spam-mail is even accepted
by our servers. By subscribing to many national lists,
up to 90% of spam, as identified by originating from
known spammers, or servers known to have been compromised
by spammers, is refused for delivery. Unfortunately,
clever spammers come up with new tricks daily, so
this tactic can never be 100% accurate. So CCIS has
a second step, which compares the subject and text
of mail you receive and tests it against it's degree
of "spamness", and rejecting mail that fails that
test. Rather than risk rejecting incorrectly identified
mail, and keeping you from receiving valid mail that
just looks like spam, users have the option
of just pre pending the word SPAM: to the subject
line. That way, you can set up most mail clients
(like Outlook Express) to automatically put suspicious
mail in a separate folder, which you can periodically
check for inadvertent rejection. To configure your
CCIS supplied spam stopper, sign in on the CCIS.net
home page by clicking "Login", then following the
instructions.
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