Free Spyware Removal - It's Not as Easy as it SoundsWritten by Kevin Souter
Spyware is a massive problem in today's world. People get paid for creating this new and annoying threat, and conversely, others get paid to help us remove it. There are ways to get rid of it for free, but it takes a hint more effort.Nobody wants to pay to remove spyware. At very least, I don't. The blasted stuff shouldn't be on my computer anyway, so what ever would make me want to shell out cash to get rid of something that I shouldn't have in first place? Spyware removal tools come in many different forms, and from many different places. Lavasoft's Ad-Aware is from Sweden, and Spybot: Search and Destroy is from Germany, I think. (Their error messages come up in German, so I have to assume..) Purchasing adware removal software can even be dangerous, so to speak. If you're buying it from a pop-up then more than likely you're just lining pockets of person that infected your machine in first place. I've had many infested machines have icons for spyware removers magically appear on desktop. Of course, if you want to actually clean anything, you have to shell out some dough. If you're going to go it alone, for free, then there are a few tools you'll need. The first is Ad-Aware, as mentioned above. Spybot: S&D is a second excellent choice. The third, and much more advanced (and therefore difficult to use) spyware remover is HijackThis. Almost all scanners will miss various adware items, simply because there is so much produced nowadays so quickly. It's impossible to keep up.
| | Rise of American Patriotism on the WebWritten by Jim Wilkson
I entered term Patriotic into Google search engine I was met with 14,200,000 patriotic web site results and 140,000 patriotic images. To my surprise, most of these results were decidedly American. With World Wide Web being just that - world wide, why is it then that there is so much content on Internet related to American Patriotism?Even before horrors of September 11th, Americans were a vocal force on Web; promoting national pride in many and varied ways. This broad-based army of poets, politicians, artists, spiritual leaders, business people and average citizens has redoubled itself in time since 911 with tens of thousands of blogs, forums, webrings, personal, community, church and commercial patriotic Web sites only a keyboard away. Upon closer inspection, I see a vast array of individuals, groups and companies out on Internet trying their best to express pride in American. The most notable of range are average everyday American putting their thoughts and images out on Internet for world to consume. Just go to www.blogspot.com or www.journalspace.com and do a search for "Patriotic" and see what I mean. I went back to Google.com and dug a little deeper into some of top Patriotic sites of today. As of day that this article was written, number one Patriotic site on Google.com, in a testament to free speech, is a Web site that parody's Whitehouse site. The www.whitehouse.org link leads to a page selling t-shirts that make fun of Bush Whitehouse. Number two is Patriotic Music Online, a USAF band site featuring patriotic music. Further down results is http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/4601/patriotic.html. This site provides patriotic graphics for use by others building patriotic Web sites. It is a site that is unique partly because of how it is hosted. Geocities is Yahoo's offering for free hosted websites. Geocities and hosts like it offer opportunity for anyone from anywhere to build their own webpage. This level of accessibility to Web was unheard of only a few years ago. It has helped cause of patriotic Web page enormously. There are many other examples of patriotic personal statements in form of communities or forums: http://p211.ezboard.com/bpatrioticamerica, http://www.pro-american.com/forums/ and http://www.network54.com/Forum/193764. For a collection of patriotic sites, I found http://www.usa-patriotism.com/, http://www.thefreedompage.org/ and http://www.usflag.org/ to be outstanding.
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