I'm clean

[Ron Nossaman]

>Why would you want someone or something to control what you send (outbound)?
>Unless you think you might accidently send a virus, but that is what 
>antivirus programs are supposed to do, right?
>
>Dave Peake, RPT

Because this Tsadbot thing I mentioned was entirely anonymous. I had no
idea it had been installed on my system by PKZip, nor that it was
trafficking the Internet. I noticed that there was a lot of modem activity,
flashing lights and such, and that my hard drive was chugging away when I
wasn't doing anything even remotely connected with telecommunication. It's
not that I think someone wants to control what I send, it's what something
on my system, installed without my knowledge or sanction, decides to send
or receive without my control that's at issue here. These aren't imaginary
Boojums of a febrile little paranoid mind. They're real, and this sort of
user control should be a basic security necessity of any operating system.
I don't have any way of knowing what's running on my system, or what it's
doing at any given time, since the Windows task list is neither complete
nor informative, and I don't know of any other software that will tell me
these things. Tsadbot did not show up on the task list. Since Microsoft
apparently didn't consider system security to be important, it would be
nice to have a working firewall that informs me of unsolicited outbound
traffic. Wish I could get Zonealarm to work, since it does just what I
want. Meanwhile, there is a very good chance that some of you out there
have this little covert undercover advertising agent chugging away in your
computers even as you read this, and I was attempting to point that out to
the folks who may not be aware of it, and might care if they were.

Ron N