This information was cause for a lot of indignant responses regarding whether Digsby is secure, which in turn led to a somewhat startled reaction from the Digsby team. In a few days, they had explained everything in several blog posts, and took serious efforts to clarify matters with their current users, as well as making the avoidance of these ‘unwanted features’ easier.

Personally, I’m siding with Digsby here. They’ve done some great things for us so far, but such a support – understandingly – can’t be kept up and running without the income of at least some money. As such, I didn’t think a moment about switching, and am still a fervent Digsby supporter.

However, I can understand that not all people are as focused when installing a piece of software. Most people just flick through an install, clicking yes and accept where ever it’s necessary. For those people, it’s important to know what they are doing — more specifically, where not to press ‘Accept’ if they want a secure ad-free install if Digsby.

In this article we’ll highlight the ad-ware placements in the installer, as well as tell you how to disable certain revenue features afterwards to make Digsby secure.

1. A Safe Installer

Digsby normally tries to install using InstallQ. This is an installer container which downloads Digsby and tries to install several other applications. The easiest way around is to use the additional installer.

This installer – which can be used to install to a USB drive (or if you’ve got trouble with InstallQ) is located bottom-right on the download page. If you can manage to ignore the big download button, you’ve avoided most of the problems already.

Contrary to InstallQ, this installer does not ask permission to install third-party software. You’ll have your lovely chat-application, and that’s that. Just make sure to uncheck the browser modifications at the end if you’re happy about your current homepage and search engine.

2. Keep a Look Out

As said before, the easiest way to keep clear of any ad-ware is to use the additional installer. If, however, you want to keep using the InstallQ package, this is where you have to tred carefully.

To install the application, it’s necessary to agree upon their terms. That’s 1 accept.

On the three succeeding screens, however, you can decline without stopping the installation process. Accepting here will install ad-ware, third-party applications that will bother you with (amongst other things) shopping notifications.

After a few declines, you’ll be safe from ad-ware harm. Just choose which search engine you’ll want to use (actually, both are good, so there’s no harm there) and you’re on your way to enjoy Digsby.

Disable Digsby ‘Research’

Another source of Digsby’s income lies in their ‘research’. They use your idle processing power (when you haven’t touched your computer for a while), to conduct research (e.g. testing out AIDS models, or optimizing grain molecules).

This is actually a pretty non-intrusive way for them to earn money and I would advise you to leave it on.

Nevertheless, people should have the benefit of choice, and might even have a reason to decline participation if they’re on a low-spec computer, or are trying to keep the electricity bills down.

Turning this off is as easy as navigating to Tools -> Preferences -> Support Digsby and hitting Disable. I urge you to read the other options as well, and do everything you can agree on to support a great, free application and keep it free.

I hope you’ve learned something from this article, and will be able to benefit from it. If you’ve got anything to say, or got a remark to make, you can do so in the comments section below. We’d love to hear your stance on alternative monetizing techniques.

And these days, we rarely see “viruses”. They typically fall into the spyware category. Pop-Ups, porn and fake AV products seem to be the most popular of malicious material presently. While your AV sits in the system tray hanging out and doing absolutely nothing to protect you.

The majority of the time you end up relying on on another product to get the annoyingware off of your machine. So now you’ve got a $60 bloated product eating up resources on your machine and doing absolutely nothing to protect you.

In order to be preventative, it would be nice to maybe give some of these products, which usually have a trial version, a run for their money before making the plunge and purchasing the full product. I’ve found a few tools to give each of these a test run, and see how well they actually are protecting you.

Testing your Anti-Virus

An IT security group based in Europe called Eicar has come with a few different tools to test the effectiveness of your preferred AntiVirus application. There a few individual files to download and run, along with a ZIPPED file that will test your AV software and their ability to scan for viruses deeply embedded into other files. I should point out that Eicar does have a disclaimer:

Important note: EICAR cannot be held responsible when these files or your AV scanner in combination with these files cause any damage to your computer. YOU DOWNLOAD THESE FILES AT YOUR OWN RISK. Download these files only if you are sufficiently secure in the usage of your AV scanner. EICAR cannot and will not provide any help to remove these files from your computer. Please contact the manufacturer/vendor of your AV scanner to seek such help.

So, in other words, unless you have complete trust your in prevention, I would use either a virtual machine or another test machine besides your main system to do this test.

Testing your Anti-Malware

Malware is a whole different ballgame, and is much more common and prevalent in today’s “internet” world. A common, everyday search can easily ring in loads of pop-ups, adware, and deeply buried malware, spying on keystrokes, monitoring cookies and just being down right annoying. The problem is that it’s always evolving, and many protective products can’t always prevent malicious activity. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attempt to block it.

Spycar attempts to hijack your system, similar to typical malware activity and gives your protection a test. Spycar does not include any “exploits”, so you do have to click OK during the process for the test to take affect. If your preventative software is successful during the process, a built-in TowTruck application responds with a rating on your prevention and then returns your system to it’s original state.

There are several different tests to run through. All attempting to try and take advantage of all the various activity that normal malware would. These tools are fantastic. Especially for a brand new system you may be setting up in a business or enterprise environment.

Although not mandatory on all PCs, having some type of protection on your computer today is almost always a must. The problem that most tech savvy users have with them, is that most, just don’t work and most eat up way to many resources. Having a way to actually test some of the options out there, is a fantastic way to make your final decision. So you try it out…Download the latest AVG, Symantec or NOD32 trial and see which comes out on top with each of these tools.

Have any good sites to audit your pc for free? What sites are guaranteed to attempt to hijack your machine? What anti-malware apps do you use?