Pair that with a potentially less-than-precise Patent Office, which frequently allows patents which are either obvious or have significant overlap with other patents (and frequently both!), then you get a recipe for litigation over the most simple of computer techniques (say, one-click ordering, pop-up windows on mobile, or cloud storage of files).

This American Life put together a fantastic exploration of this topic.  Check it out.  http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack

Nevertheless, there are some computer security companies which make available some good antivirus software, and they give it away to home users. Those companies hope to make money later, either from upgrades, or indirectly as a marketing cost leading to higher trust levels (for instance, tech people buy their software for non-home situations) I often will recommend these packages to my clients, and they work well in a pinch.

The biggest problem with these programs is that they can turn into “nagware” – that is to say, they start nagging you to buy an upgrade. AVG, for instance, used to be pretty quiet, but now (in 2008) its newest version is total nagware.

• Avast! 4, from the Czech company Alwil. http://avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html The main annoyance with this software is the yearly registration requirement, but that is no more or less annoying than some website registrations.
• AVG Free, also from a Czech company, AVG (formerly Grisoft). http://free.avg.com/download-avg-anti-virus-free-edition — AVG has been amping up the upgrade nags quite a bit lately, so if you install this, be prepared.
• Comodo Internet Security: http://www.comodointernetsecurity.com/download_cis.html — This program is a bit technical and geeky, but its latest upgrade strikes me as worthwhile.

There are a few other currently free antivirus software packages – for instance, Avira AntiVir and Eeye Blink – but I can’t say anything one way or another on those two.

About two years ago, I tried to get Hamachi working — that was the original project by this company, so far as I know.  Frankly I was left a little baffled, and ended up using the old standby, OpenVPN.  However, compared to Hamachi-of-two-years-ago, LogMeIn is wonderfully slick.

I foresee a time when I’ll be using its Rescue, Pro, and Backup versions — there are situations appropriate for those kinds.  (Pro allows you to locally print off a remote program; Rescue lets you help people remotely without an install; Backup does what backup implies — competitor to Mozy?)  But for now, LogMeIn is good enough to keep me from exploring further VNC, PCAnywhere, Connect, Remote Desktop, SharedView, WebEx, or Glance.  In the future, those will surely become part of the mix.

After looking at it a bit, I had to shut down the web browser, and though I couldn’t find any malware, I made sure her workspace was over at a non-admin account.

Now today, I find that reputable websites (that is, if mlb.com and canada.com are reputable) are serving advertisements from doubleclick — and those ads are the culprit. This youtube video shows what happens.

What can you do? Well, we are now in the age of cross-site web programming, wherein almost all websites are assembled together on the web browser to create one’s internet experience. You have to assume that even responsible websites will be using scripts, videos, or widgets from other sites. And you also have to assume that they won’t catch everything. So: you have to practice safe browsing, now more than ever. This means one thing, above all:

Don’t browse the web when you’re using your computer in a profile or account which can make widespread changes on your machine. (These are usually called “administrative” accounts.)

If you do, well, you’ll be paying someone to clean up your machine sometime soon.