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Spyware Software Disappointment

If you have been following this week's adventure with the Popups you might be interested in this bit of information.

A colleague mentioned a friend had a Popup Virus a while back and found a program on the web to solve it. While we were searching we came upon a site called NoAdware.net.

They suggested we download their program — NoAdware — “for free” to see whether our systems were infected — so we did. However, after running the program we were greeted with a screen inviting us to register the software and pay — in order to have a problem(s) eliminated. I found this quite surprising as there was no mention on the site about this before we downloaded and wasted our time running it.

In my opinion, IF a company is allowing someone to use a trial version, the trial version “should work” uncrippled. IF the company does not want to allow this, I feel it would be better to “not” offer the program for a trial download! Plain and simple, I am not fond of sites offering crippled software, and better yet, not letting you know about it in advance.

As an aside: I have no idea whether this program works or not, I am not going to pay to see if it does!

Posted by roz on August 21, 2004 10:25 PM |

Comments

Ahh... those @#$!! things. I actually destroyed my entire operating system trying to manually remove a program that had attached itself onto internet explorer as a shell. After I got it running again, I installed firefox, banned IE, and all has been fantastic. not one popup in three months. :) Makes me happy. http://www.mozilla.org (oh, came over from the mt forums, looks like you got everything running good!)

Posted by: cbeck | August 22, 2004 12:47 AM

STRANGER THINGS ARE HAPPENING... Before I shut down last night I initiated a check on my computer for Adware and Spyware. I used the free version of Ad-Aware SE http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/. The very software that I wrote about “NoAdware” (who asked for the money to fix my system) came up as “Malware.” Interesting!!!

Posted by: Roz | August 22, 2004 03:24 PM

Thanks Rich: It looks like I was right just from an integrity viewpoint. However, it did tag something on my system that I could not find during an Internet search for the culprit! As an aside, do you have any idea what I can use to get rid of my Popup intrusion? I have to use Popup Stopper (which DOES work) as a Band-Aid to not have Popups (two at a time) when I am surfing. This started happening last week. Obviously I was someplace where I should not have been. Thanks for writing and your contribution. Roz

Posted by: Roz | August 24, 2004 11:40 PM