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September 4th 03, 06:28 PM

On Wed, 03 Sep 2003 23:58:24 GMT, (Phil) wrote:

It listed this as a
browser hijacker in the TrustedQSL portion of the LOTW beta software I had
installed earlier. Is the ARRL loading our computers with spyware now?

Probably not. The ARRL is loading your computer with software that is
designed to communicate with other software via the internet.

Then again, maybe you should verify your checking account balance,
maybe LOTW is making automatic contributions to the ARRL's BPL
account in the middle of the night :-)

Any software that's on your computer that is allowed to play the ET
PHONE HOME game has the potential of being "spyware". The fact that
your ARRL logbook software has the function of contacting the ARRL's
computer is probably why it got tagged.

The clean it up software you installed is probably just looking for
anything that makes certain system calls, i.e., does things that have
the potential to be "bad".

Just because it got tagged doesn't mean it's doing anything bad. It
just means it has the potential to do things bad. If it is doing
anything bad, it wouldn't be the first time that "trusted" software
got caught.

Anytime you load any application that's capable of communicating over
the internet with other machines, you should be very sure it's NICE
software. Trouble is, that's very hard to be sure of unless you sit
and monitor packets going in and out of your box........

And then there's the bigger problem. Not only do you need to trust
the ARRL not to intentionally do anything bad, you need to trust
that their programmer is smart enuff so that he didn't build in some
more security holes on your box so that somebody else who is bad
can use your ARRL software to do bad things.

Personally, I would never install any (especially FREE) software that
claims to be a trojan finder - who knows more about how to make a good
trojan than the guys who write software to find them. Other than Bill
Gates that is.......

I think your best protection is a firewall. One that requires you to
give specific permission to each program that requires internet
access. That way NOBODY can phone home unless you let them.

Or the ultimate protection scheme. Eventually, we are going to all
need to have at least two computers. One named GARBAGE, which we hook
to the internet, and another with the mission critical important stuff
on it which is NOT hooked to the internet.

73, Jim KH2D

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