who can i trust??

thanks all

your help is gratefully accepted

waterboy

i agree with the guys but i have to add something.

I NEVER TRUST A SINGLE PROGRAM TO DO SOME WORK,I TRY TWO OR MORE FOR THE SAME PURPOSE AND THEN TRY TO COME TO A CONCLUSION!!!

that's it :)

The cleaner from Moosoft is legit, and will remove trojans, etc.
That one you can trust. If you dont, research it for yourself --> www.moosoft.com

What i do when downloading programs (most of the time) is i download it to a computer that i can afort to reset, or another hard drive in my computer (its the one where you switch them out). And then if i find it is doing what it is supposed to do and i like it, i put it on my main computer/hard drive.

if you are really paranoid just run a virus scanner over all programs you download/recieve, however i find you can trust the major well known companies except maybe M$?!?

get a freebie firewall, tiny and zonealarm are pretty good, turn off alerts because a lot of new users confuse internet trafic with attacks, have an up to date virus scanner (I use AVG) and trojan scanner (cleaner). That's just some good sense.

We talk about who's programs we can trust. Well, why, do we have to to "trust" that they don't have any backdoors built in, or unwanted ad annoyances, or 'spam'? Is there not a way to find out for ourselves what the program is designed to do, short of learning the programming language entirely.?

I have a vauge idea of how this could be accomlished. Uncompiling the program, then searching for key functions or strings...would there be an encryption problem trying to uncompile? Not really sure.... But i know it could be accomplished... Just wondering if there is a shortcut...
.

zepherin i have something to say about the antivirus you have chosen.even if avg is free it has a very weak search engine.and i will tell you why i'm saying this.i used to work in an internet cafe.as an administrator i had to protect all the machines from getting infected.but we didn't have the money to spend for buying norton,mcafee or anotheer commercial antivirus software.so i decided to trust avg which is free.so i installed it and i thought i was safe.i was daily updating the virus definitions and thougth that they were safe(the pc's).one day i installed back orrifice on the server by mistake.then i tried to scan the server in order to see what avg would do.as you can imagine it found tha trojan in my machine in c:\windows\.......
i tried to clean it up.then i rescanned the machine and it was supposed to be clean.the scan results were saying that "no virus found".
but then i thought: "what about trying to access the file that was supposed to be infected before?".
i did it and you can imagine what happened. i came up with a message saying that the spacified folder was infected.
i rescanned the machine and i came up with a warning:"virus infection".

ps:i did the same experiment on othr machines and had the same results.
i finally used a copy of my antivirus software in order to disinfect the machines!!!!!!

:) :) :)