Computer users spurn the internet courtesy of spyware

Stephen Seemayer had the first Pong video game system on his block. A decade later, the Los Angeles artist was the first of his neighbours to get a personal computer.

And in 1996, he was so inspired by the World Wide Web that he created a series of small paintings for viewing over the Internet.

Now Seemayer, 50, is once again on the cutting edge: Sick of spam clogging his in-box and spyware and viruses crashing his system, Seemayer yanked out his high-speed connection.

"I'm not going to pay for something that I can't use," he said.

A small but growing number of frustrated computer owners are coming to the same conclusion. They're giving up or cutting back their use of the Internet, especially at home, where no corporate tech support team will ride to their rescue.

Instead of making life easier the essential promise of technologies since the steam engine the home PC of late has made some users feel stupid, endangered or just hassled beyond reason.

Seemayer's machine, for instance, got so jammed with spam that he stopped checking e-mail. When he surfed the Web, pop-up ads from a piece of spyware he couldn't wipe out spewed sexually explicit images and used so much computing power that the PC would just stop.

So when his son left for college in September, Seemayer finally unplugged.

Now when he uses his computer, it's to compose letters or organise photos anything that doesn't require interaction with any other system.

Seemayer is still in the minority. Overall internet use continues to grow.

But 2004 "was a real turning point in a bad direction," said technology analyst Ted Schadler of Forrester Research. "People are getting really angry. They're angry at Dell and Microsoft and their cable providers, and that's appropriate. They should be."

In a recent survey, 31 per cent of online shoppers said they were buying less than before because of security issues.

And although more people are signing up for high-speed, commerce-friendly connections, the proportion of US internet users paying for things online barely budged in 2004 from a year earlier.

It rose to 27 per cent from 26 per cent in 2003 after jumping from 20 per cent the previous year, according to Harris Interactive.

Aggravation level

For many users, spyware was the last straw. During the last 18 months, the sneaky programs have soared to the top of the list of tech woes, triggering the most tech support calls to Dell Inc, the nation's top PC maker.

Spyware lurks on as many as 80 per cent of computers nationwide, according to the National Cyber Security Alliance, a trade group.

Spyware generally transmits information to third parties and sometimes takes control of a PC, usually to display ads.

The most pernicious varieties have instructed millions of computers to make expensive toll calls or logged every keystroke on affected machines, sending account numbers and passwords to identity thieves.

No one is immune. Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates discovered spyware on his personal machine not long ago.

The aggravation level has reached the point that some people in the computer industry believe it threatens to undermine advances of the last decade, during which the internet has grown from a virtually empty domain to a global community of 800 million souls. They say they need to act before the same early adopters who led mainstream Americans online lead them off.

It may well be up to private enterprise. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are exploring a crackdown on spyware, but government efforts to stop another online scourge, spam, have had limited results as many people with an e-mail account will attest.

Prank message

The root cause of the problems is the open architecture of the internet, initially inhabited and managed by a collaborative community from government and universities.

"The internet ... grew out of a shielded, nice-guy environment in academia," Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen said. Then, "The worst abuse might have been sending a prank message. Nowadays, the Net reaches everyone in the industrialised world, including large amounts of people with no shame and large numbers of criminals."

Microsoft's dominant Windows operating system also makes it possible for malicious code to spread, in part because it was designed to allow so many functions.

Once a weakness in Windows is discovered by hackers, it can wreak havoc on millions of computers before Microsoft can offer a patch which typical users might not take the initiative to download.

Consumer advocates claim that state and federal laws against spam don't help. Courts have protected software vendors from most consumer lawsuits, and some have contended that the companies are all but immunised by warnings buried in lengthy user agreements, those boxes with massive amounts of text with the "I agree" button at the bottom.

Whatever the reasons, the threats have evolved from minor annoyances to serious computer risks.

A computer owner for seven years, Peggy Kasul of Grand Rapids, did a little shopping online. Her husband used the machine to help manage some rental property, and her 16-year-old daughter wrote term papers for school.

Then her daughter went on the internet to research a paper on the issue of breast-feeding in public. As if she had typed in a magic word, spyware ads for porn sites popped up and wouldn't go away.

Soon the computer was unusable. It took more than three weeks and $300 (Dh1,101) to get the thing working again, by which time all the family's data had been wiped out.

Now Kasul sends her daughter to use the computers at school or the library.

"I don't do much shopping online anymore, because that scares me," Kasul said. "I go to the store."

The biggest factor behind the rapid increase in spyware is the amount of money at stake. Blue-chip companies including Motorola Inc, Verizon Communications Inc and JP Morgan Chase & Co use it, along with thousands of others.

The businesses most often accused of distributing spyware, including privately held Claria Corp, WhenU Inc. and 180Solutions Inc, say they are providing legitimate "adware" services to customers who approved the installation.

But their disclosures are often misleading or buried: a recent Claria licence ran for more than 60 electronic pages, first mentioning the phrase "pop-up" on page 18.

Some 180 Solutions programs have been installed through Microsoft security holes. And out of 100 million WhenU installations, 80 million have been removed, a company executive said.

Much spyware arrives bundled with programs such as screensavers and file-sharing software.

"The part that worries me most is the tremendous amount of money that can be made by tricking people into installing junk on their computers," said Ben Edelman, a Harvard graduate student who has testified against spyware companies. "It's a great business."

The defences remain scattered. Windows PCs often do not come with antivirus software installed.

Firewalls and spam blockers are usually separate too, and there are dozens of small companies offering what they describe as anti-spyware products some of which are actually fronts that install spyware.

"Staying safe online has gotten too complicated for the average user to do by buying individual products and making them work together," America Online spokesman Andrew Weinstein said.

Realising that such fragmentation is making matters worse, some companies are rounding up the pieces of a more