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CounterSpy and Microsoft Antispyware
Microsoft's new Microsoft Antispyware, even while it is still in "beta" form, is quite impressive. Microsoft purchased the rights to market their own version of Giant Antispyware, a well-respected anti-spyware product. After a couple months, they announced that it would be free for individual users, but that they would also have a network-administrator version designed for businesses, which would be a product for sale. The beta has been available for months and received prompt accolades from the press and users. I tried it, liked it, and recommended it.
However, a couple months ago, the rumors began that Microsoft was in negotiations to acquire Claria, or at least its software. Claria is "the company formerly known as Gator," who renamed itself because of all its bad publicity over adware loaded with Kazaa.
Well, that news was bad enough. A few days later, the news broke that Microsoft was now recommending "Ignore" as its action to Claria's "Gain" product and and a number of others which had previously received "Quarantine" recommendations. Needless to say, this created quite an uproar in the anti-spyware / anti-adware community. One example is Larry Seltzer's July 12th article at eWeek.com, titled "Why Microsoft Antispyware is Untrustworthy".
I decided to look at the other licensee of Giant Antispyware's technology -- Sunbelt Software. Sunbelt's product is called " CounterSpy" and can be very aggressive (it's an optional setting) in its identification and recommendations for quarantine or removal. In my initial scan after installing the trial version, CounterSpy complained about "Google Earth," which was the "Just for Fun" item in my August 1st newsletter.
If you think about it, Google Earth monitors your keystrokes and mouse movements in the Google Earth window (presumably only while it is the active program) and transmits them to Google -- this causes additional information to download to you in real-time. (By the way, this interactive web technology is the hot-and-coming thing. One term for the technology is AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.) Of course, this keystroke and mouse monitoring resulted in CounterSpy identifying Google Earth as having "keylogger" spyware. CounterSpy recommended removing it.
After trying the 15-day trial version of CounterSpy, I purchased two licenses for CounterSpy. These were for my wife's and son's machines. My desktop continues to use Microsoft's Antispyware for comparison purposes. For my notebook, I tried the CounterSpy v1.5 beta, which is a much-enhanced version. When v1.5 was released, I purchased a license for my notebook. The other two computers were automatically updated from the older v1.029 version to the v1.5 when it was released. The extremely reasonable price for CounterSpy, which offers both scheduled scanning and always-running, real-time protection, made the decision to purchase CounterSpy very easy.
CounterSpy works with Windows 98, Me, 2000 and XP. Microsoft Antispyware is available only for Windows XP.
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Copyright © 2005-2006 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.
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