The Spyware Revolution! It’s getting worse, not better.

In 2000 Stardock was presented with an opportunity. It was near the height of the dot-coms and one of those dot-coms recognized a fundamental truth about WindowBlinds: It had the ability to fully control what was presented by the Windows GUI. So not only could WindowBlinds change the look and feel of your Windows GUI (title bars, push buttons, borders, etc.). But it could add new content. And one of these dot-coms came to us with a fairly straight forward proposition – integrate advertisements into the Windows GUI and you could make big bucks. We turned them down.

While lots of money is always appealing, we did not want to be the company that made it possible for advertisers to take over your desktop. But that was before spyware really took off.

In the post-dot com collapse, advertising has lost much of its value but if companies could advertise without having to be on an actual website, they could still make money. And that’s where spyware has come in. What is spyware? Odds are you have some on your computer. In fact, odds are you have a lot of Spyware on your computer. Spyware are various programs that manage to get themselves installed on your computer, usually without you knowing it. They sit there quietly informing their patrons what you are doing on your computer. Maybe they’ll just report what websites you visit. Maybe they’ll send back what programs you use. Maybe they’ll list what songs you listen to. Who knows. Different programs spy on different things. Some of them will hijack your web browser so that you end up going to different websites than you intend to. Or maybe they’ll pop up an advertisement randomly on your screen.

What they definitely do, besides invade your privacy, is cause all kinds of stability and performance issues on your computer. A couple of weeks ago I ended up having my system brought to its knees simply from having visited a website that used a vulnerability in Internet Explorer to install dozens of Spyware programs onto my computer. It took the better part of the day to get them off. They’re as bad as viruses to remove and most anti-virus software won’t remove them.

More: Joe User