Spyware is insidious. While there are many invasions of your privacy these days, in most cases you can do something about them. At least most don't cost you money. But once your computer is infected with spyware, you probably won't even be aware that you are being spied on. And it does cost you actual dollars!

All this came home to me recently when at a mate's place. Knowing I "have something to do with computers"(!) he made the comment to me that he was going to have to buy a new computer for the kids because the current one was just too old, too slow.

I asked him what it was "A Pentium II 600," he replied. "What?" I said. "That's still a quite powerful machine even by today's standards," (the current top-of-the-line machines are 2+GHz.) I told him SILICON CHIP is produced on 600MHz Pentium II machines!

"Well, look at this," he said. He powered the computer up - which, I noted, took much longer than I would have expected. Even the virus checker seemed to bog down - without finding anything. I glanced at the taskbar and there were three or four applications running that probably didn't need to be there. But then he tried to log onto the internet via Optusnet.

From clicking "connect" (ie, starting the dial-out procedure) to being able to do anything on Optusnet's home page took about four minutes. I had to agree, that was very slow. But in the meantime the modem was going mad. Bulk data was moving somewhere! And once on, logging on to any new pages or sites seemed also painfully slow. I asked him if he wanted it fixed.

Is the Pope a Catholic?

First thing I did was had a look at the hard disk - a good size, 10GB, but almost full (just a couple of hundred megabytes free). But there was nothing obvious taking up such bulk space.

So I then searched for any .tmp files which had been left behind. <start-search for files or folders-*.tmp> There were only a "few" - 583 to be exact, totalling almost 1GB.

It didn't take long to delete all those, then I started asking questions. The computer was used by three teenage children. "How do you turn the computer off?" I asked, The two older girls said "by using start/shutdown". The boy was unusually quiet - but one of the girls dobbed him in. "He just switches it off at the power point. We've tried to tell him that's wrong but he won't listen".

I hope he'll listen now!

Then it was time to tackle the slow internet connection. I downloaded Adaware (from www.lavasoftusa.com) and then ran it. 258 suspect files found! While Adaware was deleting them for me, it was back to the kids. Again No 2 daughter spilled the beans on her brother. "He downloads anything and everything off the net. You name it, he downloads it".

Now this kid is a real menace (they should have called him Dennis). If it can be blown up, crashed, broken, dismantled . . . he'll do it. The best time the family had was when he broke his arm and was in plaster for eight weeks. He's that sort of kid.

I tried, as calmly as I could, to explain the dangers of downloading stuff from the net. "Unless the source is trusted, you're likely to get all sorts of things invading your computer," I said. "I'll bet you get dozens of spam emails a day."

"Oh, sometimes its hundreds," said No 2 daughter. "Is that why we keep getting ads for porn sites and casinos popping up?" asked No 1 daughter.

"Porn?" asked mate's wife, now showing obvious concern at what her kids were being subjected to. "Can't you stop that happening?"

I showed them how to block senders in Outlook Express but informed them that this wouldn't stop all the spammers. "Now they have your email addresses, you're targeted. They change their names, often just slightly, almost every day, so your blocking filter won't catch them.

"Look, I've been caught too." I explained how the other day I had a spam email come through similar to one I'd previously blocked. When I examined its properties, included were the words "bounce" and "block filter". The spam factory knew that I had blocked their email and had bounced it, so it was automatically assigned a new name to get through. They are that determined.

And only yesterday I discovered yet another spin on spam. I received yet another unbelievably generous offer of something-or-other I didn't want from the good ol' USA. Not only would I never take advantage of the offer, I could never take advantage of it because it was "open to residents of the USA and Canada only" (they're really clever, these Yanks, spamming the whole world with useless garbage applicable to America only!).

But when I tried to block it, I found that they had put my email address in it as their own source address. So there was nothing I could block! As I said, spammers are determined.

So we looked at the spam and put blocks on as many domains and addresses as we could - at least that will slow the spammers down a little. Then I removed some of those programs from the startup menu that were clogging up the works.

Finally, I used a handy shareware utility called treesize.pro which gives a graphical and detailed report on what is taking up the space on the hard disk. Sure enough, most of it was his downloaded games (among other things!). And in many instances, multiple installations of the same game in different directories.

It didn't take long to uninstall (where required) through the control panel and delete multiple installs. Finally, I rebooted the machine.

I was happy to find that it booted significantly faster and even happier to note that instead of the several minutes that it took to log onto the net, it was now only about 20 seconds including the dial-out.

My mate was impressed, I have to say. No need for that new computer!

Once again, I tried to explain how to use the 'net and, more importantly, what not to do. But I'm fairly certain the kid wasn't listening. He was more interested in the fact that I'd cleaned out hard disk space.

There was this gleam in his eye and I'm sure he was thinking about what he could download into that 5GB when I had gone. . .

What should YOU do about spam?

Spammers cost YOU money. Every time you receive an unwanted email, you are paying for the download - in time, in your download allowance, etc. Do something about it. There's a rather un-genteel acronym: "GOYA" (the first three words are get off yer . . . .). Well, do it! Spammers won't be stopped unless enough people act.

(a) NEVER NEVER NEVER take advantage of the spammer's most generous offer to remove or unsubscribe you from their list. All that does is confirm that your email address is correct and that you are reading your emails. You'll be bombarded with more spam.

(b) Apply a block to the spammer's URL if it is one of the generic spammers (ie, someone@spammer's name.com). Don't simply apply the block to the spammer's email address because they will simply change some part of their email address to get past your block.

If the spammer is, say, someone@hotmail.com or one of the other public email organisations, block the email address and not the URL otherwise you won't get any more emails from anyone else using that service!

If you're using Outlook Express (the world's most-used email program) you'll find the block filter under MESSAGE - BLOCK SENDER. You can also apply a block to newsgroups to block those pests who like the look of their own name in print and continually fill up newsgroups with garbage, much of which could be defamatory if they weren't hiding behind aliases!

Incidentally, most public email services such as Hotmail have their own spam blockers built it. Use them!

(c) Complain, complain, complain. Some of Australia's largest ISPs are also some of the world's worst when it comes to spamming. You and I have to continually bombard them with the only thing they understand - lots of email messages to their complaints department, about them not filtering out spam.

Many will simply ignore these emails but if enough people start sending enough complaint emails, it will start costing them money by clogging up their systems. Then they might then sit up and take notice.

(d) Complain to your local member of Parliament and to the Minister for Telecommunications. Governments do have the power to do something about spammers; like most things though they need a bit of a kick along to get them to do anything.

(e) Change email servers or even ISPs - and tell the old one why you are changing. Nothing speaks louder than lost revenue.

(f) Join one of the anti-spam organisations. Google "spam block" or similar and you'll find several organisations who are fighting the fight against the spammers. Help them to help you!