The Security Mentor

It runs quickly on my (clean) machine and brings up only one of the two false alarms that I saw before Microsoft bought the product from Giant Antispyware.

Here's a review of Microsoft Antispyware versus AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy on a thoroughly infected machine. Microsoft Antispyware catches more than the other two. But as always no one program gets everything. Run more than one and concentrate on prevention.

It's been three days since I wrote about what Microsoft's policies on identifying spyware ought to be, and already an issue has come up. The distributors of a controversial program asked Microsoft to reclassify them as harmless. Microsoft complied.

The program is called Weatherbug. It displays continuous weather news and hits you with ads. Near as I can tell, it gave itself a bad name by being almost impossible to uninstall in previous versions, and by being distributed along with other, nastier software so that people reported horrible things happening after installing Weatherbug.

I can't give you firsthand information because I won't allow it on my machine. The distributor claims that all it does today is display ads and send your zip code to get your local weather. I can't find any evidence online that it actually spies on people.

In other words it looks like Microsoft did the right thing in this case, despite some feverish headlines like "An Integrity Test for Microsoft". Just don't expect them to remove software that causes popup ads, unless that software is spying on you or hurting your computer.