About SpywareInfo

This site is dedicated to giving you the tools and knowledge you need to protect your privacy from the onslaught of spyware, adware, and corporate and government surveillance. Click here for an explanation of spyware.

If you need help with fixing a problem caused by spyware or a browser hijacker, you can post your questions in our support forums.

If you need help right this second, you can try our chat room. Usually someone is in there, but depending on the time of day (or night), there may not be anyone that's paying attention.

Please don't email me with support questions, as I have been overwhelmed with email. Use either the forums or the chat room. You will get your answer quicker that way than you would waiting for me to find the email and respond to it.

SpywareInfo also publishes the Spyware Weekly Newsletter. The Spyware Weekly Newsletter is distributed every week to 15,180 subscribers (as of October 4, 2004) and read online by hundreds of thousands of visitors.

This site is optimally viewed at 1024x768, 32 bit color with Internet Explorer 5 and higher, Mozilla .0.9.6 and higher, Netscape 6 and higher, or Opera 6 and higher. However, it will also look fine even at 800 x 600, 256 colors, although some of the graphics may look odd.

All pages on this site are designed to comply with official web design standards and will work in any web browser that is also designed to comply with those standards. If your browser is older than those mentioned above, do not contact me about pages displaying incorrectly. I don't care how old, nonstandard browsers butcher standard code.

All pages on this site (those with the same color scheme and layout as this page) should work fine in text browsers and probably in hand-held internet devices. When you print a page, it will use a stripped down style sheet with few colors and will hide the top area and background image to save you ink (use print preview to see what I mean). Sorry, Internet Explorer 5 manages to screw this up so I removed this feature temporarily. I'll fix it if I have time.

Why do I see plain text on this site with Netscape 4.x?

All version 4 browsers are very bad browsers. Netscape 4.x is the worst of this bunch. Even when it was new, it did not conform to accepted web standards. It has very poor support for the cascading style sheets used to construct this site. It also has a tendency to crash when it tries to display newer CSS properties, so I've rendered it incapable of even trying.

The content of this site is still available to you, but you will see none of the design. This is 2008, not 1997 when Netscape 4 was released. Please consider upgrading to a browser which includes support for current web standards.

You can read more about this problem at alistapart.com.

The Spyware Weekly is your weekly source of information from the inside of the anti-spyware, pro-privacy movement. Every issue brings you important news from the privacy front and updates about newly discovered spyware. Each issue is packed full of tips and links to software and web sites that can help you guard your personal information.

Please note that this newsletter does contain ads in both the online and emailed versions. If you don't wish to receive ads or html in your email, you may of course read it online at http://www.spywareinfo.net.

You agree not to sign up any email address that requires any sort of anti-spam procedure that requires that I reply and/or enter a code to validate my email address. If I receive any email with instructions to do this, I will terminate your subscription. If you think I am going to spam you, don't subscribe.

You agree not to sign up any email address which sends an automatic reply of any sort upon receipt of an email. These auto-replies are very annoying, they use up my bandwidth, and they clog up my inbox. If I receive an automatic reply from your address after sending out an issue, your subscription will be terminated. This specifically includes out-of-office replies. This does not include vacation auto replies. Those I can understand.

These are simple terms. If you disagree with them, you can choose not to subscribe. As explained before, it is always available online at http://www.spywareinfo.net/.

Currently, I am a writer. I have published articles for Intermute, Lavasoft, and DogReader. Several web sites and email newsletters have also republished existing articles of mine with my permission.

I am also starting to work as a software consultant. Unfortunately, for legal reasons, I am unable to say for which companies.

I am an administrator at the TomCoyote message boards. I also volunteer at several other message boards devoted to privacy and/or security. For a period of time, I was an administrator at the Lavasoft Support Forums, the official support site for Lavasoft's Ad-aware.

I am formerly an OP (moderator) for the Lockergnome IRC chat room, as well as several other chat rooms.

I wish I had discovered web design sooner because it's fun playing with these pages. As I have added more and more content to this site and with the help of friends, I have taught myself html, xhtml, PHP, javascript and CSS. Still, I'm not a professional web designer, so please keep that in mind when/if you find mistakes in the site construction.

If you'd like to make a monetary contribution, I have a PayPal account set up for this. I am very appreciative of any donations made. There is more information on our support page.