CounterSpy - will you marry me?

It's been a long time since I really fell for a piece of software...

The first time was 1986, the year I discovered SuperCalc3. You mean you update one of these "cells" and the whole "spreadsheet" changes - amazing!

Since then only a few packages have really won my heart. Lotus123 because it handled printers better than SuperCalc. A plug-in called @Risk for Lotus 123 which did really cool Monte-Carlo statistical simulations. Homesite 4.5, my weapon of choice for web authoring (still beats all the clever Dreamweaver stuff). Photoshop 4.0 for doing graphics(before it got so clever it started to takes ages loading and rendering fonts). Apple iTunes, for the ease of ripping CDs. Olympus Camedia for easy photo viewing (although it never worked without crashing on my Windows 2000 machine).

Interesting that none of these are Microsoft products. I cannot feel any affection for Word. The way it mysteriously switches styles, the way it turns URLs and email addresses into links even when you don't want them to be links - just pitiful. Excel is a better product, although how annoying is it when you hit "help" by mistake and have to wait 45 seconds for the useless help screen to open. And if you create a circular reference, what is that crap with the little arrows? I use outlook all day long, and it's OK, except why can Google search a bazillion pages of the internet in 0.34 seconds, and Outlook takes 2 minutes to search 300 email messages?

A few days ago I downloaded CounterSpy by Sunbelt Software - and already I think it's one for the Hall of Fame. Every night at 5am it combs through the files on my computer. In the morning it produces a little report on all the nasties the bad guys have hidden on my machine which tell them what websites I have visited, what I looked at, what I bought. And then it helps me nuke them.

A lot of spam contains SpyWare. Even if you never open the message, if you just check it out quickly in the preview pane of Outlook, that's enough to transfer the payload to your computer. Then some guy in Cheliabinsk knows that you exist, what computer you use, what ISP, what operating system, what browser. And if he's a smart cookie, he can set things up to receive a stream of data on what you are looking at.

But it's not just guys in Cheliabinsk you have to worry about. The advertising services used by plenty of reputable internet sites and retailers in Europe and the US also leave cookies and spyware on your machine. If they can spot the same user popping up on a few different sites they serve, then they can target the advertising you see. Thing is I NEVER click on any ad on ANY internet site EVER, so what's in it for me?

Anyway, now, thanks to CounterSpy, every morning is a new day. They put their cookies on my machine - and my new friend nukes them. If there's one thing I love more than a nicely designed piece of software it is the thought a spammer, scammer or spyware designer totally wasting his time. Download CounterSpy now - at just $19.99, love is in the air!

PS - no I'm not sponsored by Sunbelt Software.