The collapse of online ethics is destroying the Internet as we knew it.

Spam gets most of the publicity. But the malware problem is getting just as bad. (Buy the book you see here.)

Spyware programs are one form of malware. Viruses are also a subset of malware. Generally anything that comes into your computer unbidden and with its own agenda is malware.

A lot of the malware you see today got its start on porn sites. (Yes, another innovation from that technologically on-top-of-it industry.) But it has spread, far and wide.

I have personally had to clean up both my kids' computers in the last few weeks, using a combination of Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy. As with viruses and spam there's a whole new industry springing up to fight malware. Why does it feel like protection?

But these two programs aren't always enough as my webmaster, TBass, (pictured. (Such a handsome man, and believe it or not girls, he's single!)) told me when he came to visit the other day. While I'd been dealing with my kids, Tommy had been dealing with some cousins.

"I learned a LOT, but I put in a lot of hours including about 14 hours of reading online, both at home and on site at my cousins. It was a lot of repetition until I could recognize patterns, and pick up some specifics."

While I just went to the Web and got the most popular shareware, Tommy went the extra mile and found two freeware programs -- CWShredder and HijackThis.

"CWShredder can be just Initiated and let do its work, but HijackThis takes a good bit of knowledge or it can be dangerous because all things Identified do not, and must not be 'FIXED'," Tommy notes.

"HijackThis gathers information from the Registry and if the wrong things are FIXED you can end up with a boat anchor rather than a computer. I had to read for hours in the "ComputerCops" website and other places before doing anything with HijackThis.

"BTW, the activity still took booting in Safe Mode and going to the Top Level Adminsitrative Account on my cousin's computer to get rid of a few things.

After this a cousin called with more trouble. "I was able to trouble shoot his daughters computer over the phone at the end of this much quicker because the learning curve was on my side by thime she called from Alabama with a similar problem. (I assured her she had not gotten it from an e-mail since in all of the reading I have done on this problem i have not seen a single incident where it came from an e-mail.)"

We can't continue creating problems and new industries that just solve those problems. Ways must be found to eliminate problems before they become problems. All the possible solutions I can think of are going to be nasty -- nasty toward your privacy, toward your freedom, toward your assumptions about what the Internet is and how it works.

But that's the way it is.