WHILE I’M WISHING GAS GANGRENE ON ZARQAWI, I’m about ready to wish it on the bastards from “The Bullseye Network” whose miserable adware is on my daughter’s computer.

UPDATE: Ran the MS antispyware beta and seem to have gotten rid of it, along with a bunch of other crap — but I had to do manual surgery before I could even access the Internet to download the program from MS. (I’ve used AdAware for this before, but wanted to give the MS version a try; seemed fine.)

Kids’ sites seem to be especially infested with this crap, which is particularly unforgivable.

UPDATE: Yep, reader Ben Cooper sends a link to this report confirming my suspicion that even reputable kids’ sites are adware nightmares:

Mainstream children’s Web sites host a glut of adware, a security firm said this week, proof that spyware makers are targeting kids in an attempt to slip by parents and get their software onto home computers.
Over a three-month period, said Kraig Lane, a group product manager in Symantec’s consumer division, his lab took new PCs out of the box, connected them to the Internet without monkeying with any of the default settings in Windows XP SP2, then surfed well-known sites in several categories, ranging from kids and sports to news and shopping.

“Our testers went to name-brand Web sites, and spent 30 minutes to an hour reading or interacting with sites,” said Lane. Testers tried to emulate real-world browser by reading articles, interacting with the site’s features, but not explicitly looking to accumulate files by downloading. “Then they ran spyware detection software and counted up what kind of security risks and how many files had been installed on the machines,” Lane said.

Children were the biggest target for spyware makers, by far. The trip to several kids’ sites installed a whopping 359 pieces of adware on Symantec’s PCs, five times more than the nearest category rival, travel. Popup ads proliferated on the machines after that, making them virtually unusable.

Message to the folks at NeoPets: Clean up your act.