I just spent the last hour or so cleaning spyware off of the boss' computer. He used his connection for the usual itinerary of innocuous tasks - weather, airport information, news - but after months of browsing with nothing more than an up-to-date version of Internet Explorer (we had neglected to upgrade him), his computer was, as I aptly described, "Dirtier than a Thai whore." All sorts of nasty, registry-embedded launchers, trackers, homepage-hijackers and phantom third-party software that had sought a habitat inside his laptop were immediately uncovered by our trusty copy of Spybot: Search and Destroy. After about a dozen sweeps, half of them before Windows load-up to ensure their separation from memory, we purged the computer of nearly all of them (something seems to be lurking, and we haven't found the silver bullet).
For an essay back in college I argued against the notion that computer media interconnection - which is to say, the internet - would successively deprive humanity of its essence. No, in fact, I was certain that the very stuff of humanity - philanthropy, journalism, scholarship, discovery, commerce, humor, trivial pursuits, peddling, fraud, theft, correspondence, worship, altercations and communication - would eventually master and gild the medium, and turn it into an extension of human activity no more foreign to each of us than a walk beyond our front door.
Some voices - even conservatives - decry what they see as the final shedding of innocence online, though one suspects that these people took early Eighties compuiter-cautionary tales like Wargames with such gigantic doses of salt that they consider the films works of fiction through and through; not to mention ignoring the market for pornography that was infamous by the early 1990s and well-organized only a few years later. Or the semi-psychotic behavior of serial gamers popping up around the same time who could only be restrained from chronic cheating by "No-alteration" policies or outright banning.
A few weeks ago I laughed at the thought of barely recalling those four-year-old memories of what browsing without pop-up windows was like, even pop-up windows for subscriptions or harmless offers from sites we know and trust. But it's a fair assessment, and returns me to my idea: the internet, once a bit of a close-knit community, has finally urbanized. Grant me leeway for a distended analogy: The skyscrapers are there for people who like them, as are the breathtakingly short trips one needs to take on the rapid transit system (critics can say what they want, cross-referenced searches on Google are unbeatable). A nightlife has started up, and you can almost always chat or exchange thoughts with someone of a like wavelength without much searching. The big city isn't for everybody, of course. While some ensconce themselves in it, some commute; and some mortally fear it, preferring to enjoy it through pictures per se, at a distance and at the most vicariously. The internet has its share of crooks, thugs, nutjobs, hobos, prostitutes, cops gone bad and souvenirs from sketchy neighborhoods that don't come out after one wash.
It's not a place for the complacent - probably never was to begin with, but the margin for error today is near zero, and getting closer all the time. For those of us who frequent it happily, the key is to leave naivety behind. Common sense never hurt anyone, anyway; nor did measured wariness ever destroy the enjoyment of everyday life. Being paranoid is many times removed from being a sucker.
A happy medium in perspective makes for the happy medium of webskirting. If you'll excuse me, the boss just called me back: that last bit of crap is giving a hell of a final fight.
UPDATE: It was Gator spyware, fighting me through fire and deep water. Then, I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountainside where he smote it in his ruin. Awful, nasty, purulent spyware. Spybot, incidentally, is a lifesaver.