If they are so great, then why do they only comprise a tiny portion of the market? Shouldn't a better product easily put an inferior one out of business? Just wondering what the big deal is.
If Lamborghinis are so great, then why do they only comprise a tiny portion of the market?
At least in my Apple-controlled mind it makes sense...
Mac's are cool - but pricey for what you get.
The maggots who write viruses write them for the Windows OS becasue it comprises such a large percentage of the market. Why go to all the trouble of writing a virus if it is only going to infect 2 or 3% of the market? DUH!
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You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of football team or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. --- Frank Zappa
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Known fact- hackers and authors of malware will always be one step ahead of the anti-virus and anti-spam cos who are in the business of reacting. Even the best firewall apps are designed w/ heuristics based on signature profiles of past attacks hoping to evolve them proactively w/ very little success.
Take my word for it- backup as much of your data as possible and make sure what you back up is CLEAN and free of viruses. If in question- pass on it. Manually copy known good files only. REFORMAT your machine. If you do not- it might (will) bite you down the road. Many those anti-virus/spyware apps are in effect spyware apps of sorts themselves and bloat your machine.
I don't care what the "IT Pros" tell you. Ask a hacker what he would do if he ever got infected. Not that I have ever heard of any hacker being infected whereas virtually every IT Pro I've come across has...
People who are still leaching music for free do it on much more trusted mediums. LimeWire is now a trap for the weekend hacks and the fodder hopper for hackers. There are no free lunches- put in the time behind the keyboard or pay iTunes $0.99 and download in good faith.
OK, I am having the same problem. I can't get anything to download, not even the suggested spyware programs. My Norton Anti Virus is dead, says I need to activate it but I can't get that to work. Also, I can't restore the computer so can someone help me with this? I am not a computer guru, I am still learning.
About the search and destroy, their are so many which one do I use?
... when I tried to download a music file which "did not open". Oh, it opened all right.....
I didn't read this whole thread, just the OP. But from your description, it doesn't sound like your problem has anything to do with limewire. I have never used limeware, although I rather suspect it is not malicious in and of itself.
It sounds like you downloaded an executable (although you thought you were downloading a music file), ran it, and it jacked your system. It's a little hard to tell for sure from your description. If so, that's not the fault of the mechanism that got the file to your system. You could just as well have FTP'ed it, or downloaded it from a malicious web page. A friend of mine had his system owned by some stupid little "registry utility" he downloaded from the web - of course without source available. It's an important distinction to make. You downloaded a file from a highly untrusted source (some other random person(s) on the net) and didn't verify *what* you got - not even whether it was data or an executable. That doesn't make limewire a "malicious virus".
Windows does a very poor job of keeping non-technically literate users from running malware - it makes it far, far too easy to confuse data files and executables (as I suspect you did), *and* it has the largest market share and the most viruses, *and* there are some core reasons why it's easier to compromise a windows machine than other OSs, so that's a bad combo all the way around. I don't recommend doing this sort of thing with a Windows OS.
You should *never* run any executable that you download from any non-trusted source unless you can compile it from source yourself *especially* if it's an exe that is pretending to be a music or video file. If you can compile it, you know (a) you're running the program that the source describes, and (b) you can reasonably verify the source as non-malicious. Anything else is just begging to have your machine jacked. The only safe way to do it is in a virtual machine which you can roll back to a known good state if what you ran was malware. Of course, MS doesn't want you running the consumer versions of their OS in a VM, so part of the price you pay for having agreed that Microsoft can restrict your use of your own property is that it's harder to experiment safely with unknown things.
Most people made the choice back in the 80's to run a very, very insecure OS (at the time, even without 15-year old accepted security such as privilege rings or enforced runtime separation of data and code (can you say stack overruns ladies and gents?) ) and then they wonder why it became a haven for viruses and malware. It has improved since then, but still has large security flaws. Yes, it's got the biggest market share so is the biggest target. But most of the blame lies at the feet of a public that values ignorance over understanding (in general - not trying to blame any specific person. But computers have been around for 50+ years now).
Last edited by novetteyet : 08-15-2008 at 08:40 PM.
I didn't read this whole thread, just the OP. But from your description, it doesn't sound like your problem has anything to do with limewire. I have never used limeware, although I rather suspect it is not malicious in and of itself.
It sounds like you downloaded an executable (although you thought you were downloading a music file), ran it, and it jacked your system. It's a little hard to tell for sure from your description. If so, that's not the fault of the mechanism that got the file to your system. You could just as well have FTP'ed it, or downloaded it from a malicious web page. A friend of mine had his system owned by some stupid little "registry utility" he downloaded from the web - of course without source available. It's an important distinction to make. You downloaded a file from a highly untrusted source (some other random person(s) on the net) and didn't verify *what* you got - not even whether it was data or an executable. That doesn't make limewire a "malicious virus".
Windows does a very poor job of keeping non-technically literate users from running malware - it makes it far, far too easy to confuse data files and executables (as I suspect you did), *and* it has the largest market share and the most viruses, *and* there are some core reasons why it's easier to compromise a windows machine than other OSs, so that's a bad combo all the way around. I don't recommend doing this sort of thing with a Windows OS.
You should *never* run any executable that you download from any non-trusted source unless you can compile it from source yourself *especially* if it's an exe that is pretending to be a music or video file. If you can compile it, you know (a) you're running the program that the source describes, and (b) you can reasonably verify the source as non-malicious. Anything else is just begging to have your machine jacked. The only safe way to do it is in a virtual machine which you can roll back to a known good state if what you ran was malware. Of course, MS doesn't want you running the consumer versions of their OS in a VM, so part of the price you pay for having agreed that Microsoft can restrict your use of your own property is that it's harder to experiment safely with unknown things.
Most people made the choice back in the 80's to run a very, very insecure OS (at the time, even without 15-year old accepted security such as privilege rings or enforced runtime separation of data and code (can you say stack overruns ladies and gents?) ) and then they wonder why it became a haven for viruses and malware. It has improved since then, but still has large security flaws. Yes, it's got the biggest market share so is the biggest target. But most of the blame lies at the feet of a public that values ignorance over understanding (in general - not trying to blame any specific person. But computers have been around for 50+ years now).
Whatever it was, it downloaded over 11,841 files into my computer as well as the VUNDOO Virus, to include something like 8000+ spyware...all at once. It was a nightmare. But the nightmare has ended through reformatting the computer. : (
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Whatever it was, it downloaded over 11,841 files into my computer as well as the VUNDOO Virus, to include something like 8000+ spyware...all at once. It was a nightmare. But the nightmare has ended through reformatting the computer. : (
Yeah, once that happens, the best thing to safely do is reformat it and reinstall.
I humbly submit that the problem was most likely pilot error. I'm honestly not saying that to be mean. My point is that there are a million ways for such a thing to happen, and you don't even have to be doing anything illegal, immoral, or fattening to run into problems (although certain things are surely more dangerous than others). Ultimately, the only real defense is understanding; no system can ever be created to protect against operator error, and a computer is a very, very complex system - many orders of magnitude more complex than most people even realize. So in the end, yes, you can reduce your risk by a learning a few obvious things such as "don't run an executable that's claiming itself to be a music file". But there will always be both technical and social engineering ways for someone to jack your system *unless* you learn enough about how it works to not fall prey to them.
I mentioned in my above post, I had the same problem but forgot to mention that I did not download or have limewire. So I have no idea where my problem came from.
I mentioned in my above post, I had the same problem but forgot to mention that I did not download or have limewire. So I have no idea where my problem came from.
Yeah - sort of what I was trying to get across above. There are a million ways to get infected. Everything from running an insecure ActiveX control (activeX = worst security idea ever, courtesy of Microsoft) to buffer overruns in some otherwise-benign application, to a legitimately purchased audio CD installing a rootkit (ala Sony Music's malware - autorun on untrusted media being the 2nd worst security idea ever, also courtesy of Microsoft). Unfortunately, since malware authors are clever, and some malware is even funded by big business (again see Sony, or any number of other examples), it takes an ever-increasing level of knowledge for the average Joe to protect himself. Just thinking "I'm safe if I don't run Limewire" is a big mistake.
This sort of crap just gives certain big business interests an excuse to try to turn general purpose computers into locked down controlled devices much like TV sets, where they can ensure delivery of advertisements to eyeballs. The days of Turing-complete computing devices under control of anyone who wants one are numbered.
Last edited by novetteyet : 08-16-2008 at 04:59 PM.
There are other ways to download free music. I'm not saying that I do this myself, but it is possible to download videos from Youtube and separate the audio from the rest of the file.
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