Originally Posted by mayonaise

since DES is an open standard, everyone in the world can have access to how DES messages are encrpyted. however it is so complicated, that decrypting it by hand is pretty much impossible. designing a machine to decrypt it has been done, but even with computing power today would take several days at the least to decipher the key used for encryption. so while technically possible to break DES encryption, several days is more than enough time for organizations to switch keys around and render the stolen key useless.

so even tho DES is an open standard and there are better schemes available, it is still widely used and considered the standard encryption scheme.

kazaa does it. regular kazaa, not kazaa lite/k++.. it's widely known that the original kazaa installs spyware on your machine that runs in the background generally without the user's knowledge. where have you been?

also, because of the endless amounts of security holes in internet explorer, windows and outlook, there are a lot of worms and spyware that can get into your system without you knowing it (use opera!). running spyware removal software regularly is a must