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This Month's Topic
Current Spyware Issues
How to Waste Three Hours

Current Spyware Issues

Ask any IT professional about viruses and spyware and he/she will tell you that spyware has become by far the more troublesome issue. Unfortunately, spyware is not as easily defined as viruses or worms and so, unlike antivirus software, which differ only slightly in effectiveness from product to product, there are big differences in the effectiveness of different antispyware products.

Needless to say, this makes an already confusing subject even harder for most users to manage. The good news is that the nerds who stay up late thinking of how to test these packages have been doing their thing and there have been a number of reviews of these products. The bad news is that the nerds don't always agree. Nonetheless, we'll try to give you the consensus opinion to the extent that there is one.

Most of the reviewers agree that the best defense against spyware is CounterSpy from Sunbelt Software combined with an obscure public-domain program called HijackThis. HijackThis is strictly a tool for advanced computer users -- we would not recommend that anyone use it who doesn't have a lot of experience, a lot of time, and very serious computer problems. CounterSpy by itself, however, does a very creditable job and most users will find that it suffices. How about Microsoft's Antispyware, which we discusses in this newsletter in February of this year? It came in a distinct second behind CounterSpy, primarily because in April Microsoft decided to give an "ignore" rating rather than a "remove" rating to the products of a company that most experts classify as spyware (this is why spyware is such a contentious subject -- experts don't even agree on what is and what isn't spyware).

If you prefer a single software suite that protects against everything, ZoneAlarm's Internet Security Suite is getting good reviews. The latest version, in fact, may rival the best stand-alone antispyware packages, although most reviewers say it's too early to make that definitive.

How to Waste Three Hours

OK, well maybe it's not a waste, but if you install Google's Google Earth program, don't expect to get any work done for at least a couple of hours. This is truly a graphics tour-de-force. The program opens with a view of earth (with the U.S. facing the user, of course) from about 15,000 miles in space and quickly zooms into a view from 4,000 miles up. From there it's all interactive, and Google has clearly thought long and hard about how to make interactivity work and work well.

The resolution of the satellite photos is quite amazing, at least in urban areas (the resolution is noticeable poorer out in the sticks). We checked out our house and realized they had taken that particular photo between 1991 and 1999 because the cars in the driveway were red and blue. You can also tilt the image. For a little fun, find Logan airport in Boston, then look out in the harbor along the approach for runway 33L. You will see a twinjet airliner about a mile out. You can maneuver the viewing position and tilt so you are immediately behind the jetliner, facing the runway, at which point you realize he is not quite lined up with the runway yet (non-pilots in the audience might find the offset upsetting; pilots will recognize it as normal, if a little sloppy).

Beyond the resolution, however, are the controls. Double-click on a point and you smoothly glide toward that point for a closer look. Click on a point on the earth and flick the mouse gently to move the image. If you release the mouse button in mid-flick, the earth just keeps scrolling by at a constant speed. Tilt the earth way over until you are looking at the horizon. Then flick the mouse toward you and you are in a low-flying plane cruising over the earth.

Google Earth is available at http://earth.google.com/. Occasionally Google shuts down its Google Earth servers for some reason. If you encounter that, simply come back the next day and they should be up.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.

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Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers
jspencer@cyberartisans.com
http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110