Specifically, Adware.

Adware takes many forms. Generally, adware is software used specifically and exclusively to display adverts, in whatever form, to the user. Many free programs these days include at least one adware program as standard - after all, the software's makers sure aren't making money by giving their software away for free, so they may as well try and get some comission right? it's only fair, they're giving you software for free, you gotta expect to pay SOME kinda price, even if it's not actually money. Hell, not having to actualyl pay money is better than paying money, yeah?

Well, that all depends on the free software. These days there's also alot of derivative, sometimes inferior, software around that is actually available in equivalent (or better) form, but without any adware.

But that's a whole other issue to what I want to draw your attention to. See, the problem with the whole concept of adware (kinda like advertising in general) is that it's inevitable you'll get some companies trying it on, as in, trying to sneak adware past those of us who've got the PC paranoia levels ramped up a bit. As you may have read previously, if by some miracle my fevered typings caught your eye, I'm currently working in It support at a secondary school. Just over the last week, a whole load of adware suddenly appeared on two Windows 2000 machines in our staffroom.

Now, I'm well aware that the Windows family of OSes ain't exactly renowned for great security. However, these machines had been given the once over by both Spybot: Search & Destory, and Lavasoft Adware, two top-class pieces of entirely free (yeah, even adware-free) adware-busting software. I'd already begun setting up our logon scripts to check for some particulary persistent and popular adware that had been found earlier on most of the school's machines (and subsequently removed). The account priveleges for both the student and staff profiles are locked down quite tightly, too. Yet at least three major classes of adware - and I've taken to calling them classes because they usually consist of more than one actual component and you can often find random bits from various classes in other classes - within a couple of hours had wormed their way onto one machine, and made it nearly unusable thanks to the excessive numbers of stupid popups. A little while later, there were some traces of the same adware on the other windows 2000 machine in the staff room, but somehow it was a little more immune.

Now, this being a school, there isn't a whole lot we can do firewall-wise. We have our 'net access go through a proxy run by our service provider - they are our ISP and filter service in one. Unfortunately, their filter service is some Netsweeper setup with a web interface. I say unfortunately, because so far my experience of this service has been...poor. We are limited to a maximum of 50 "allowed" and 50 "disallowed" URLs, and URLs can be just URL parts, or even single words. But this is waaay too restrictive for our needs, and if you need to block any more, your only hope is either that the site(s) have been classified correctly by the Netsweeper people, or that they'll take notice when you request a site's reclassifcation (which, by the way, can take a month or more). We currently don't have the resources to setup our own dedicated, local firewall machine - maybe next year.