While the feast was being prepared at my sister's house on Thursday morning, our brother Scott spent a couple hours trying to remove adware, spyware, and other trespassing programs from her family's PC. When he was done the machine ran much better, and faster.
Here's a report by Ben Edelman who has documented the illicit installations from visiting a single webpage.
How bad is this problem? How much junk can get installed on a user's PC by merely visiting a single site? I set out to see for myself -- by visiting a single web page taking advantage of a security hole (in an ordinary fresh copy of Windows XP), and by recording what programs that site caused to be installed on my PC. In the course of my testing, my test PC was brought to a virtual stand-still -- with at least 16 distinct programs installed. I was not shown licenses or other installation prompts for any of these programs, and I certainly didn't consent to their installation on my PC.Posted by jackhodgson at November 26, 2004 11:02 PM