I hate malware!

I went home to my parents house for a nice relaxing weekend away from the hustle and bustle of city life, and I find that their computer is absolutely riddled with spyware, adware and various viruses. I generally don't like to reformat computers (because it takes so long to re-install all the software), so I did a clean-up instead.

The thing about all the spyware and stuff is that it is so invasive. For a start, Norton Antivirus got absolutely nailed by something, to the point where it actully won't install, so I put Grisoft's AVG Free on the computer instead, and it picked up 17 viruses all in the windows system folder.

I think the most annoying thing about cleaning this box up is that it is getting quite old, and it feels very, very slow; but the root of the problem is, in my opinion, down to the operating system. The computer is running Windows 98, and it is showing its age. Now, I am not some anti-microsoft campainer, but there are some aspects of windows that really are pretty stupid.

For a start, the registry, a big data store of all the system settings, excessively bloated by bad uninstallers which don't remove everything their respective installers put on the system, is a very bad way to store application and system settings. I guess the idea behind the registry was to store all the settings in one place, thus making it easier to find, but it really doesn't work. I find that the unix use of config files is much better, and since the more recent revisions of the linux standards base, which require that every program keeps all of its information together in its own directory, it has become easy to remove an application completely.

The next problem with windows is how open to attacks it is. Now I know that this has been somewhat addressed in XP with SP2, but there is still lots of room to improve (hopefully Vista will make some good improvements) especially while Internet explorer is still vulnerable to nefarious ActiveX controls.

I have had it pointed out to me, though, that Windows is not as bad as it seems, which is true. The main reason that there is a distinct lack of malicious software for the unix/linux/osx arena is that their market share is just too small to warrant it. For instance, most people who own a mac are reasonably affluent people (on account of their disproportionately high cost), and probably less computer literate than the PC market (due to the fact that most of the programming hard-outs etc run a pc with windows or linux on it), so right from the outset, there aren't a great deal of people who can be bothered looking for holes in OSX. I sometimes wonder why there aren't many viruses for unix/linux, and I guess it is partly because of the market share issue, and partly because there are so many people who work on unix/linux code (because it is open) that there just aren't a great number of holes that are easy to exploit.

At the end of the day, I guess it is easy to find fault with something that is in the spotlight, and we can only hope that Microsoft will gradually get things more and more right. It all goes to show, though, that there is safety in obscurity.

Word.