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ok, i'm SICK of hearing about the supposed spyware that microsoft includes with windows xp. i am now a paranoid user (sarcasm). someone please show me the light. tell me where it is, what it does, and how i can stop it. please, i want to know. someone tell me exactly what spyware is included in xp.

This post has been edited by gameguy: Jan 23 2004, 16:06

uhh tons! microsoft monitors the porn you download how many times you hit ctrl-alt-del man you should not use computers anymore

The only thing I ever heard of was in SP1 it was an ALEXA...run spybot it picks it up and removes it. There are quite a few non-essential programs, error reporting, windows messenger, etc. You may use these though...
check out: http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm
to see what processes you're running.

ah man.. i never thought i'd see gameguy making a thread like this

My personal feeling is that WindowsXP CAN report a lot back to MS if you want it to. It kinda asks you first though. I don't think there is much suspicious going on.

it's just that people keep talking about it and i know they're talking nonsense. i am quite knowledgable about windows (edit: at least xp, i forget a lot about win9x ), and to my knowledge, there is NO spyware in xp. however, some things can be interpreted as spyware (sending hardware/network info with bug reports, etc) but those things are either anonymous or there's another explanation for that particular thing.

Me either! I though you knew better, GG! I thought you knew XP like the back of dougkinzinger's hand!

read my post above your's.

There are bits it does send. Most of which don't ID you or your PC. Sometimes it will ask, but usually not (most are set to send by default).

All in all, nothing to worry about, but when I had XP, I disabled all of them out of habit.

Now I am a Linux user, and my data goes to Linus Torvalds! lol

This is an excellent example of someone asking for specific answers to the question "what spyware, where is it, tell me exactly", and some idiot spews forth the same old crap "oh, it's there dude..."

Congradulations, thanks for taking a dump in the thread.

Now...would someone be so kind as to answer the question?

I guess it depends what you define as spy ware, if you class bug reports and program crash’s sent to Microsoft as spy ware then most os's do this take linux bug-zilla, that sends bug reports but it doesn’t contain your name or anything like that.

At the end of the day we don’t really know what ms and other company’s really know about us. And you could go mad thinking about it, so look at it this way is it really a problem, granted I don’t like to think that a company such as ms would know so much about me but lets face it people like to think there’s a conspiracy behind things 99% of the time there isn’t.

My view is there’s no real spy ware in xp there might be error reporting tools but nothing that would send anything incriminating.

I hope my post is ok njlouch as I remember last time you posted it wasn’t well thought out, sorry about that im 15 and grated not very bright I did get an E in English on my mocks, so sorry if it doesn’t meet your standards.

Dan

Excuse me, but I was confirming that although WindowsXP does send out some information, it can all be disabled. Some of it is enabled by default, and none of the data personally identifies you or your PC.

The last comment was a simple joke (as it was ridiculously juxtapositioning Linus Torvalds into Bill Gates' position). I think you took it a bit more seriously than you should have.

reiterates juxtapositioning......yeah

hums the tune: Tool - Schism

so... there's only been one example?

alexa is just doing it's job. for it to be activated, the user must click the "related links" button in IE, which for some reason, i can't find right now anyway, YOU have to start it, and it's just doing it's job. it looks at the page you're viewing and searches for similar/related websites. if you don't want this functionality, just don't click related links and remove the button. some people use it.

True, but honestly man, I wouldn't worry about it