Update on the 1000HE

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 by Dave Winer.

A quick note -- I decided yesterday, that rather than deal with restoring the new netbook that was crippled by malware after just a few hours use, I would instead take advantage of Amazon's generous return policy. I sent the computer back yesterday, and today, before noon, a new one arrived. I spent about half of the day provisioning it, something I'm getting good at.  

But this time I've used the new knowledge I have about protection to install various tools that help guard against a reinfection. I promised I'd list those here so others can benefit from the incredible outpouring of information from the members of the community.  

First, I declined to update Java and then went to Add-Remove Programs, and took Java out of the system entirely. Perhaps someday this computer will need Java, then I can download it from Sun's website. Until then I don't want to take the chance that it was the opening that the malware got in through. (It's the one thing I updated, and when I went to a perf test site to measure the speed of my connection, the little app was running in Java. It's all I could think of, so it maybe unfair to blame Java, just want to say that.) 

Then I installed the following apps: Ad-Aware, Avast, Spybot and Malwarebytes. The last is, according to Stan Krute, a tool that will help if the computer gets infected. Yesterday I learned how important that is. The malware made it impossible for me to get to the Norton site to get a tool that might remove the bad stuff. Same with McAfee and the Microsoft site for defending against malware. It's a good idea to have the removal software already in place when you need it. 

Ad-Aware and Spybot are two old friends. In the days of Kazaa (a supposedly nice program that totally ruined a laptop with spyware) they helped get rid of the infections that kept coming back. In those days I was using IE. One of the blessings of this age is Firefox. It may not be the perfect browser, but it isn't full of all the openings of ActiveX and whatever else IE leaves open that the bad guys take advantage of. I will never ever under any circumstances run MSIE again.  

Everyone says great things about Avast. I've run it once, it installed easily. 

At this point after just a few hours, all the tools say the computer is 100 percent clean. I have the OPML editor running, and uTorrent, Firefox, VLC, SlingPlayer, iTunes and not much more. Ready to kicks some butt I hope.