Re: Secretly Monitor EVERYTHING your spouse/child has been doing onINTERNET !

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

I believe the original post had more to do with stealth recording of whatever the
user might be doing at a particular computer. This is a very real capability, and

nothing new: employers have been able to install such programs on the work-
stations at their site for quite some time -- for example, to make sure that their

employees were not goofing off or doing illegal things on company time. Similar
programs are for sale to home users, for monitoring what the kids are up to, etc.
So far as I'm aware, any court challenges to the legality of such software, on
privacy grounds, have failed.

Jay McNally wrote:

> then informed me he was going to turn the image on my screen upside down,

> which he did. Suddenly it was as if my computer screen was upside down! Then he
>
> said he was going to make everything blue and yellow, or some such colors,
> which he did, to my utter astonishment.
>
> I was in a sort of shocked disbelief, and immediately turned off the
> machine.

> I'm told the old Napster and the thousands of the current Napster clones

> are sources of some of this.

That, and the various chat programs. There should be no great surprise
here either. They work by making use of certain communications ports
(not to be confused with hardware ports like LPT or COMM) that are
functional in the process of being connected to the Internet. Of course,
Windows has the sloppy security habits that are comparable to leaving
every door, casement, and trellis on your house wide open to the outside
world, making this even more invitng to intruders.

An anti-virus program isn't going to cut it here. You need some sort of
a firewall, if you want to regain control over these ports. There are the
hardware type (moderate to expensive in cost, and complicated to set
up), or the software type. In the latter, ZoneAlarm is reputed to be the
best, and the base version is free. It's also _relatively_ simple. I'm not
sure about the URL, but any search engine should hit on this quickly.

Jordan