At small group today, I struck up a conversation at dinner with my neighbor at the table, and we soon got into talking about what we did for a living.
Anyhow, this guy mentions that he does programming for Gator -- one of the most prominent and intrusive adware/spyware companies out there. Instantly, the mood at the table (primarily composed of other techies) upon hearing that word changed. A shocked silence was followed by expressions of disbelief, and heckling shouts along the lines of of... "Gator?!? Now you die!... I can never look at you the same again..." etc. Good natured ribbing of course, but nevertheless tense.
I must say, it's certainly easy to vilify (justifiably, but that's a topic for another entry) adware/spyware/spammers/the various other "evils" of the Internet world. But it certainly adds an interesting dimension when you're talking to not only a real live person who's in some way responsible for it, but that person is also in your small group as a brother in Christ.
Anyhow, after people shared their horrible experiences with Gator's creations, and getting rid of them, I had to reflect on the unnecessary pain that everyone could easily avoid -- the solution is simple: don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer. Only IE has the capability to automatically install software from the browser itself with the simple action of browsing a web page. Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera will cheerfully ignore all those hidden insidious software downloads.
As a Mozilla user, I can definitely say nowadays it's at a parity with IE in terms of rendering speed and compatibility with web sites in general, so I suspect that the real reason why people don't use browsers other than IE is simply laziness to switch from the default that already comes with Windows. For everyone out there, here's some advice -- get off your lazy bums, and download a alternate web browser to cure your ad/spyware woes!