Being on dialup when at home, I get to notice a number of things taking
place in background that you might not be aware of when on a high-speed
connection, such as wifi.
A couple of days ago, I noticed that shortly after I got my dialup
connection the activity indicator would go on solidly even if I wasn't doing
anything, and would go out if I closed Firefox. This did not happen with IE.
Looking through emails was excruciatingly slow. I immediately suspected
another malware or virus intrusion, so did a scan. Nothing.
I then used Outlook Express (the Microsoft file manager) to see what if
any files had been installed or modified on the hard drive. I didn't see
anything on the first day, but yesterday there were a number of new folders in
the Documents and Settings folder. One of these was named "safebrowsing".
Huh? Never heard of it.
A quick search with Duckduckgo revealed that it is a Google Toolbar
product that sends any URL you access to Google for evaluation. OH REALLY?????
The site:
<http://www.avinashtech.com/disable-google-safe-browsing-firefox/>
provides instructions for disabling safebrowsing. I went beyond their
instructions and anything labeled as TRUE was toggled to FALSE. Turns out that
this item has been around for a few years, but it was only installed on my
machine in background in the past few days. What's curious here is that I just
removed all Google items from my hard drive, but they are still streaming in
and taking over. I suspect that my Spybot malware utility will soon identify
it as malware and delete it just as it did with Pricebong.
Chris
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
- Hunter S. Thompson
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