Breaking, Entering Your PC (on where to get help)

[papau]

Aumha http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spyware26-aumha-link,1,2316030.hyperlink
Lavasoft (AdAware freeware) http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spyware26-lavasoft-link,1,1888364.hyperlink
Spybot http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spyware26-spybot-link,1,7586552.hyperlink
HijackThis http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spyware26-hijackthis-link,1,2054985.hyperlink

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spyware26nov26.story
Breaking, Entering Your PC
Spyware, the newest and nastiest online plague, can paralyze or commandeer a computer. Help is hard to find, but it's out there.
By Terry McDermott Times Staff Writer November 26, 2004

<snip>That's when I stumbled onto AumHa.org, a website named for the first and last letters of the Sanskrit alphabet. Wherever I had expected salvation might reside, it was not in a land where the residents spoke Sanskrit.<snip>

The site has multiple forums for various computing problems, but the overwhelming number of inquiries in the last year has dealt with spyware, which on the site has a variety of less neutral names, "scumware" being one of the more polite. Scumware had been an epidemic; in the last year it grew into a pandemic, said Steve Wechsler, one of those drawn to Eshelman's site.<snip>

Eshelman works a full-time IT job in Burbank. He spends almost the equal of another full-time job working at AumHa. Dyer guesses he spends more time online offering help than he does making a living.

Other AumHa volunteers regularly quit volunteering because they become so consumed with the work, and passionate about it, that it overwhelms their non-Web lives.

They almost always come back, though. The bunch of them, and others at similar sites, say they feel as though they're caught up in a great struggle and feel honor-bound to continue.

"It's war," Eshelman said.