It's a Wild, Wild Web (and for that matter the rest of the internet)

For better or worse - the internet is still wild.

Over 30 years after its initial inception, large portions of it are virtually untouched by legislation and other methods to control it. I think this has both positive aspects, and negative aspects.

What's more clear-cut is that software companies large and small have serious problems writing code that effectively deals with malicious activities. Just earlier today I managed to get a spyware infestation going on my PC.

I feel so dirty!

I think most spyware infections are the result of user incompetence. People download "video viewers" and similar software that contain trojan code. I did nothing of the sort.

My main error is that I put a little faith that Microsoft had cleaned up their act with Internet Explorer 7.0. My initial conclusion is that they have not. All I had done was clicked on a questionable search result, and 5 seconds later my hard drive was grinding. Soon after I had strange icons in my system tray - telling me I was infected with spyware (which, ironically, I now was).

I checked after that fact - and I verified that I had all the latest updates. I'm not sure what happened exactly - but I'm only using Internet Explorer 7.0 for testing purposes from here on out. FireFox isn't as sexy, but I'm less concerned about it having security problems.

In addition to the web, email also remains quite wild. Despite predictions by one Bill Gates, unwanted messages remain a major, major problem for a large percentage of email users in 2007.

Bill Gates now seems more interested in robots than spam. Considering how far downhill Scientific Humanitarian, err, American has gone - I'm not surprised they didn't check out the accuracy of his ability to see the future beforehand.

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