Microsoft to protect us from Microsoft
Microsoft has given us all an operating system that gets attacked on a regular basis from Spyware, viruses and more. Now they have decided to give us tools to fight and/or remove these problems. Today they made available a free anti-spyware tool. Of course, the only way to get it is to use their security plagued browser, Internet Explorer, because it requires an ActiveX control to verify you have a legitimate copy of Windows. I tried to download using Firefox and it did download a utility. When run the utility claimed I wasn't legal. So I tried again with IE and my Windows had magically become legal.
I downloaded the software and it installed without any problems. When it first came up, it asked several questions about whether I wanted it to update itself, run in the background and joining their "Spynet" community. When done, I ran a quick scan to see what it would find. I didn't expect it would find much, if anything, as I regularly run both Spybot Search & Destroy and AdAware. Three potential threats were found and each was rated for its severity. I could choose various actions for each and a recommendation was made so I didn't have to choose blindly. If Microsoft were to secure their browser, a tool like this wouldn't be as necessary. But since IE is so unsafe, it is good to have a worthy tool available for free from Microsoft.
I downloaded the software and it installed without any problems. When it first came up, it asked several questions about whether I wanted it to update itself, run in the background and joining their "Spynet" community. When done, I ran a quick scan to see what it would find. I didn't expect it would find much, if anything, as I regularly run both Spybot Search & Destroy and AdAware. Three potential threats were found and each was rated for its severity. I could choose various actions for each and a recommendation was made so I didn't have to choose blindly. If Microsoft were to secure their browser, a tool like this wouldn't be as necessary. But since IE is so unsafe, it is good to have a worthy tool available for free from Microsoft.
posted by Foster D. Coburn III at
2:30 PM
2 Comments:
Hi. I went to the Microsoft site and had no problem downloading the "Genuine Windows" checker or the anti-spyware program using Firefox 1.0. Running the checker gave me a validation code! Maybe it's because I have Java installed on my machine.
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