http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3633167.stm

after reading this and knowing i still have miner issue with both on my M$ systems, is this even something i need to be concerned with when it comes to *nix?

im slowly moving more and more toward full *nix desktops at my school, and will only be keeping 2 M$ systems at the house purly for gaming.

in M$ i know what to do to protect and reduce the amount of that junk in my systems, but have no clue when it comes to *nix. still a mega newB when it comes to what *nix can and can not do, and what *nix is vulnerable to and what it is not vulnerable to.

thanks for the feed back.

Well unless you run as root nothing you download can do your system any harm. Plus as far as I'm aware there are no programs for linux containing adware or spyware other than those that tell you (i.e. the ads on the free version of Opera).

Because most linux software is open source there are many people working on it, and many others reading the source code, so if a program did contain something suspicious then someone would alert the rest of us (or so you'd hope). Also, because many linux users believe in free software and 'digital freedom' in general, it's unlikely they'd want to use something as underhand as spyware.

That's what I think anyway