By MATT RICHTEL and JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, July 15 - Add personal computers to the list of
throwaways in the disposable society.
On a recent Sunday morning when Lew Tucker's Dell desktop computer was
overrun by spyware and adware -- stealth software that delivers
intrusive advertising messages and even gathers data from the user's
machine -- he did not simply get rid of the offending programs. He
threw out the whole computer.
Mr. Tucker, an Internet industry executive who holds a Ph.D. in
computer science, decided that rather than take the time to remove the
offending software, he would spend $400 on a new machine.
He is not alone in his surrender in the face of growing legions of
digital pests, not only adware and spyware but computer viruses and
other Internet-borne infections as well. Many PC owners are simply
replacing embattled machines rather than fixing them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17spy.html?ex=1279252800&en=5b2b6783f66a7422&ei=5090
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And how long do they have those _new_
machines until they also get polluted and have to be replaced? I'd
think there might be a market in doing some dumpster diving, retrieving
those old machines, doing a total init of the hard drive and starting
over from scratch, reloading them, etc. My pay for same would come
from refurbishing the old machines with a totally new (and as of
then unmolested) hard drive, absolutely _loaded_ with all the most
recent virus protection and spam protection software. Then I would
sell them for fifty or a hundred dollars each. And I would probably
load Linux on them instead of Windows, or maybe in addition to Windows
2000 or Windows 98. PAT]
Monty Solomon (