Like a rain drop on the ocean.

In response to a post I made in a recent thread I was accused, through a private message, as being: callous, heartless, unfeeling.... I could go on but I'm sure you get the point. Just to show my heart is in the right place I have come up with these many words that most likely will fall on deaf ears.

Not long ago it was safe to send your child off to school 2 blocks away alone and unsupervised. In most cases you were safe to assume that he or she would arrive each day safe and sound. It was considered an added precaution to lock your door at night on the remotest of possibilities that someone would come in and robbed you while you slept. The rare telephone call was a charity or civic minded organization calling for your support through either your participation or financial assistance. In the mail the postman brought there was almost always a bill with the occassional personal letter to brighten your day and the occassional flyer from the local retailer advertising their wares and this was all welcomed in most cases.

Those days are now long gone. You wouldn't dream of letting Mary or John toddle off to school on their own. If your fortunate enough that (s)he has a sufficient number of freinds to accompany them making the sojourn safe you have no doubt admonished them with rules to make them street smart. Such as don't talk to strangers, stay away from cars with a stranger inside them etc. You probably lock the front door behind you when you get in. When the telephone rings one out of ten calls is from a telemarketer and it's widely accepted as normal behaviour to tell them you are not interested and politely hang up and you certainly are considered gullible at best for providing these people with you credit card information. The majority of mail stuffed in your mailbox is usually makes a one way journey straight to the Recycle Bin right from the mailbox.

Why then do these rules go right out the window when your at your computer? That little white or blue or black box sitting on your desk certainly contains magic. The magic I am referring to is a window to the world also known as the internet. When you're surfing ever wonder what the "WWW." stands for? World Wide Web. Not only does it allow you access to the world it also leaves open a window into your own private little world if you're not properly protected or practise unsafe surfing and or email habits.

Anti Virus Software
Even for the non-initiated computer viruses are a common pitfall that are well known even if to some what they are and how they work are a complete mystery. Click this link for general information all about viruses, worms, and trojans This being said it is surprising how many people are connected to the internet without having any anti-virus software installed. I can hear some of you chuckle and sneer at this recipe for disaster. Even more surprising would be many of you who haven't updated your virus definition files. With at least fifteen new computer viruses are created each day. Are you protected? Installing typical desktop virus protection isn't enough... because more than seventy per cent of all virus infections occur on computers with desktop virus software that is either not up to date or has been deactivated by the user. While there are increasingly more inventive ways to get a virus the more typical ways to become infected are through:

(1) Opening e-mail from either the creator of the virus (most typically someone you don't know) or through infected sources that have you in their address book.
(2) Chat rooms like m.I.R.C. or I.C.Q. that use I.R.C. (Internet Relay Chat)
(3) Visiting web sites with malicious codes written into them.
(4) Downloading infected files through P2P programs like Kazaa (peer-to-peer architecture)

There are other ways to contract a virus certainly but the list in its entirety is longer than I care to go into. Here are some tips to help you avoid being infected:

(1) Do not open any files attached to an email from an unknown, suspicious or untrustworthy source. Keep in mind major corporations like Microsoft do not send out unsolicited email!

(2) Do not open any files attached to an email unless you know what it is, even if it appears to come from a dear friend or someone you know. Some viruses can replicate themselves and spread through email. Better be safe than sorry and confirm that they really sent it.

(3) Do not open any files attached to an email if the subject line is questionable or unexpected. If the need to do so is there always save the file to your hard drive efore doing so and make sure your antivirus software has scanned the file.

(4) Delete chain emails and junk email. Do not forward or reply to any to them. These types of email are considered spam, which is unsolicited, intrusive mail that clogs up the network.

(5) Do not download any files from strangers.

(6) Exercise caution when downloading files from the Internet. Ensure that the source is a legitimate and reputable one. Verify that an anti-virus program checks the files on the download site. If you're uncertain, don't download the file at all or download the file to a floppy or other removable disk and test it with your own anti-virus software.

(7) Update your anti-virus software regularly. Over 500 viruses are discovered each month, so you'll want to be protected. These updates should be at the least the products virus signature files. You may also need to update the product's scanning engine as well.

(8) Back up your files on a regular basis. If a virus destroys your files, at least you can replace them with your back-up copy. You should store your backup copy in a separate location from your work files, one that is preferably not on your computer.

(9) When in doubt, always err on the side of caution and do not open, download, or execute any files or email attachments. Not executing is the more important of these warnings. Check with your product vendors for updates which include those for your operating system web browser, and email.

While there are many good antivirus programs available the two most widely used are Norton and Mc Afee . Both of these programs are available for purchase only. The price varies from retailer to retailer but usually around the $50 to $60 U.S. mark. Gaining in popularity are both online virus scanners and freeware virus scanners. Online virus scanners such as Trend Micro's HouseCall or RAV are sometimes very helpful in detecting virus scans that have somehow 'slipped by' your antivirus software. Free antivirus software is also available directly for download from relatively younger or not so established companies. Grisoft's AVG (free for home use), Alwil's AVAST! (free for home use), and HBEDV's AntiVir Personal Edition (free for individual use) all come highly recomended and not just because of the price. Each of these providers update their programs and virus definition databases on a continual basis and ofcourse are still free!

You are not alone

Everytime you visit a website there are transactions going on behind the scenes with or without your knowledge or permission. Sometimes this can be a good thing and sometimes not. One of these 'transactions' made are an exchange of cookies in the most generic sense cookies are totally benign bits of information. There are some however created by advertisers' for purposes of tracking your web surfing and sharing that information between two or more unrelated sites for the purpose of gathering and sharing private user information. Alone a single tracking cookie is probably harmless if the advertiser is presumably honorable and doesn't use the personal information you provided to the website, such as an email address, for say spam a topic we can touch on later. If you are like a lot of people you quite likely have a lot more of these tracking cookies than you're aware of. Carrying around a large amount of these things can slow your enjoyment of the net just the same way as lugging around a golf bag filled with potatoes would interfere with your day at the links.
And tracking cookies are just the beginning. There are Spyware, Malware, and DataMiners, all forms of what is commonly called “Adware”. These programs vary in function, but commonly they track where you are going on the internet, what type of search engines you use, what you search for. Some of them steal your email address and sign you up for SPAM! , some of them cause your PC to have advertisements pop up constantly. The problem begins when adware hides the delivery of components commonly referred to as spyware (also known as trackware or thiefware). Spyware uses your Internet connection to secretly transmit data to the company supplying the ads. This data, including personal information required to install the software combined with information about your online activity, is then sold or traded to third parties in exchange for more advertising dollars. The information is most commonly used so advertisers can more specifically target you with future ads.
But there is an even more devious level of spyware that may be living on your machine. Some spyware is so sophisticated it can (and regularly does) search your system Registry for information such as your real name, the software you have installed on your machine, and whatever other information it can find. This information is then shared with third parties.
You are constantly being bombarded by reasonably benign levels of spyware in the form of Internet cookies, but the most powerful spyware is being delivered with adware downloaded from the Web. And don’t be fooled, spyware can come in the smallest packages. Even the tiniest applications you download, such as media player skins, download assistants, and FTP clients, can house spyware. And so the best way to avoid installing spyware is to show a little more caution with the software you install on your system.
Many adware applications dutifully warn users in the installation process that their personal information will be shared with third parties. Of course, finding this warning is not always easy and often requires reading a lengthy licensing agreement. Often the end user is guilty of, at the very least, passively opening the door to a spyware invasion.
Spyware is designed to go unnoticed. And simply removing the host software that installed the spyware components on your system will not always remove the problem. Fortunately, there are several software solutions that will detect spyware activity on your system (much like an antivirus tool) and will help you remove the offending entities. The best known of these products are Ad-aware, PestPatrol
SpybotSearch and Destroy. All three products (ranging in price from free to $30) promise to hunt down all forms of spyware and clean them from your system.

Another way to thwart the efforts of overzealous advertising services is to install a firewall. Products such as ZoneAlarm,
Sygate Personal Firewall and
Tiny Personal Firewall will let you know when software on your system is trying to send data out to the Internet and block it. And although this may sound like an extreme solution for your home PC, a firewall is arguably the best ongoing protection against this kind of invasion of privacy.


SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM!
1. Never respond to SPAM. Choosing the “unsubscribe” verifies that your email address is valid and you will probably get even more SPAM.
2. Never buy anything advertised by SPAM. People send unsolicited commercial email to make money. If no one buys the products advertised in SPAM, the incentive to send junk e-mail is reduced.
3. If you post to news groups disguise your email address (ie. meATmsnDOTcom). It will circumvent some of the robot harvesting engines from picking up your email address.
4. If you post to news groups set up a separate account for that purpose (yahoo or hotmail). If spammer's get the account it won't interfere with your real account.
5. Read the popup adds carefully. Clicking on them often installs software which sends your user information to a "Spam house". It’s best to click on the “x” in the upper right hand corner to kill the popup rather than click on any button.
6. Read the End User License agreement (EULA) when you subscribe to mail lists. Do they provide your email address to others?
7. Do not send your email address through chat rooms, instant message services or Internet bulletin boards and newsgroups.
8. Do not forward chain email. This special type of email is considered spam. It is unsolicited, intrusive and may clog up email servers, slow down Internet traffic and it provides your email address to everyone who receives the message!
9. Keep your anti-virus up to date. A number of new "viruses" have appeared which turn your machine in to a SPAM distribution centre (nice eh? your own machine sends the SPAM to you and your friends, your IP gets logged and you get blacklisted!!).
10. Switch off "Preview / view attachments in-line" on your e-mail management software. To preview an e-mail is to open it and this can send a signal back to the sender, so beware.
11. Consider add-on spam blockers. Consumer Reports searched for filters that best managed to block spam messages while still letting valid e-mail through. The top rating went to a free blocker, SAProxy by Stata Labs,available at, though installation can be tricky. Two other highly-rated blockers but not free were, Mailshell SpamCatcher Universal and, Blue Squirrel’s SpamSleuth. What's good about all three of these products is they will update themselves online from time to time, just like an antivirus program would, so they get the latest clues as to what the most recent spam trends are.
12. Find an Internet Service Provider that blocks spam. Some have anti-spam filters at the front door where e-mail comes in and that's a real boon. The more the ISP can filter out at its front door, the less downloading of junk you have to wait for when you have a dial-up. Some also offer "junk mail" buttons, which customers click when a message slips through the front-door filter, thus adding the sender's address to that filter. ISPs that offer this option are updating their filtering throughout the day based on what their subscribers tell them.
13. Make your address complex the longer e-mail addresses that have a random element to them are much harder for spammers to figure out than short and sweet e-mail addresses. That's because sometimes spammers conduct dictionary attacks, taking common words or names and adding on letters and numbers in a systematic way, trying all combinations until they find an address that works. The less easy an address is to get that way, the less likely you are to get spammed.
14. Check Web sites' privacy policies before sharing your address and be on the lookout for those little boxes with check marks: A lot of times those boxes are pre-checked for you and it gives the Web site permission to do whatever they want with your address.http://www.media3pub.com/images_bro/spam.gif

Howdy Calp:

Not sure what this was in reference to but you aren't alone..

Of course, I was cruel and callous with some answers i gave to people more through frustration than anything else..

My biggest peeve are those using email and surfing the net without adequate protection.. I have told more than one, more than once that anyone doing that is one step short of being an imbecile and their best fix is to give their systems away !!

Not nice, but how many times have those here helped someone to ignorant to apply your simple rules !!!

Murray

Much wisdom in these posts you do have,
Sometimes innocence gives a new user overconfidence in their capabilities only to find themselves flung on the rocks by the winds behind the surf,
In all things one must learn how to survive before you learn how to enjoy,
The art is not knowing how to do it but who to ask for advice and to learn to take it all on-board,
The young always think they know best it is a matter of history not just a matter of fact,
It is not a lesson for today but a lesson for life.

Excellent post Calpitor.

The main idea is that VirtualDr has built a very good reputation for itself in answering the questions from people in all computing experience levels. It's a computer informational site that has discussions, and should never be considered as a chat-room.

There have been many sites that eventually turn into chat-rooms, which is unfortunate, because they forgot that without the questions, the forum really serves no purpose, and then members begin to post little funnies just to check and see if anyone is still alive.

No person deserves to be insulted by another member. That's the ideal method, but of course, in practice, it doesn't always happen that way. Demeaning treatment of others and hot-headed replys only tend to drive the inexperienced member off, as well as the experienced professional. In both cases, VirtualDr has lost some valuable resources, and we the members have then taken a loss.

Excellent advice as usual Calpitor :)

I think I'll print it out and give it to my neighbour, who having been faced with a massive download for Norton Live Updates tonight, has now decided to get broadband. As he'd never even heard of a firewall until I mentioned it the other day, and had no idea that it was necessary to update virus definitions, those words of wisdom should come in extremely useful.

Calpitor,
Real good post. I must applaud you for taking the time to type that all out.

Quote:

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Originally posted by markp62
Calpitor,
Real good post. I must applaud you for taking the time to type that all out.

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Dito Calpitor Dito !

I'm still reading...

Very well done Calpitor:)

I will bookmark this and will keep it for future reference.

Thanks

:)

unless one is lucky enough to have a pc mentor, it takes a while to get it

http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/tec082403.html

Excellent read, Calpitor! Now, if only we could get all the right people to read it.

I sometimes wonder what percentage of computer repair per year, world wide, is dedicated to virus infections...must be in the billions. And now with all the spyware issues...as far as I'm concerned, spyware is just one byte away from being a virus.

I certainly hope you will not let it get to you. All my friends and family think I walk on water now because I'm able to come up with these great fixes for their computer problems. What they don't know is I get all my answers from here.(Yes, I've been taking full credit for it...but not for money..lol) :D

Seriously though, I've learned a lot about computers, but not nearly as much as I would like, and I have come to depend on yours and many other's advice and help from this forum. It would be a true loss to lose such a great resource.:)

Fubar

Thanks to everyone for their kind words. Gotta agree with fubar "if only we could get all the right people to read it". I better watch it I don't want to step in it again.

I sure can remember being a "newbie" and being totally thrilled with all that I fould on line. It wasn't very long however before I had a inbox full of spam. I thought it was neat in those days to check the little boxes for updates on downloads. I also had no idea that signing up for passport portals to some of the major websites was an invitation to trouble.

Because I didn't so any online banking, nor make credit card purchases on line that I was "safe". I thought I would be 'virus exempt'. I didn't know that my lousy internet connection was due to bandwith theft among other things.

So, one day as a newbie I decided to try out a virus scanner. Every time I turned around something was trying to dialup my connection. I DOWNLOADED it, and actuallyy knew i had to INSTALL it but didn't know I had to CONFIGURE it also! So, the scaner sat on my pc doing nothing for quite some time.

Then one day just for haha's I was clicking buttons in the virus scanner and that's when I discovered you had to tell the scanner what to do. There was a SCAN button too! AND, in order for it to check email, you had to tell it to do that too.

So, the next thing I know, after hitting the scan button, I've got whistles and sirens going off all over the place! I had 5 major viruses. Some were key loggers, some were back doors, some were memory resident, I had everything. I don't recall the names now, but they were the popular biggies around 1994 or 5 or so .

I didn't know anything about how scanners cleaned a system so I went through all the trouble of wiping my hard drive and reinstalling everything. Thankfully it was only an 80mb harddrive! Was easy to do in those days lol!

It took me 3 or four wipes before i got sick and tired of that because some things were resident on my pc and I didn't have disks for it all. It was stuff that the pc company put on there when I bought it, and I coldn't replace it!

So, learning the hard way taught me to use a virus scanner. Then I began learning about Firewalls. There was some talk about this program called zonealarm. Testimonials at that time included folks who said the program found "back doors" on their computers. Well, I downloaded it but I was afraid of it. Still a newbie, I didn't know what was safe or what wasn't. The colors alone scared me. It showed I had some back doors on my pc that weren't being detected by the virus scanner, I thought maybe zone had put them there. I since learned otherwise, but sheesh, I plain didn't know this stuff. But I learned.

I had no idea where to go and look for help, infor etc. I really didn't know how to navigate the web. I might find something I liked, but wouldn't know how to get back there again. I backed out of each and every window to find my home page again. It was VERY overwhelming for me. I didn't have a "guru" or anybody to teach me how to do anything. I had to learn the hard way.

I didn't know that it was attachments causing viruses. I didn't know that just having the preview plane open represented one click on an email, and that clicking it again was the second click that launched the virus.

It never occured to me either that just because I knew the email recipient, that I could still get a virus. They could get infected unknowingly as well.

Virus scanners at that time didn't detect trojan horses like they do today.

I said all that to say that it's easy to forget what it was to be a newbie. It's like being a little kid. You don't know where the dangers are, or how to assess a situation to determine what a potential danger is.

I have one friend, a newbie. She mis clicks on stuff all the time and sometimes her emails come as attachments 3 deep. She has no idea that that happens. She hasn't a clue about downloading a file to a folder, finding that folder, installing the program or configuring that. Someone set her up with a computer, and said click here, click there push this and off the email goes.

And she has a difficult time learning because she gets overwhelmed with details, then can't remember what she was just taught, so she goes back to doing things the way she's used to doing it.

How many people are like that?

Does it help that scam artists are changing techniques? I have more security software on my pc now than you can shake a stick at. And I still ask, how long will it be before someone discovers that this piece or that piece of security software was in fact a ruse to get something off your pc, or put something in for their benefit and not yours?

I depend on forums such as this and a couple of others for security information. When I go to threads on must have software, I depend on someone saying up front that this is adware, or spyware or mal ware, or shareware.

You have no idea howmany times I've shared the link to this forum with friends, family, other users etc.

Sometimes I too get so darn tired and frustrated with telling the same people the same things, and they refuse to heed...till I think back on my own innocence and how it took a hammer on my pc to wake me up.

I'm even guilty of saying ...well, if these people refuse to learn (which just so happens to be MY definition of stupidity), then they deserve what they get. But that's not true.

NOBODY deserves to have their private property infringed upon. And those who infringe really do need to get what THEY deserve.

Forums like these are excellent avenues for informing the unwary and shutting down the software writers.

At the beginning I wrote some capitol letters.

DOWNLOAD
INSTALL
CONFIGURE
RUN/SCAN...what ever the case may be.

That alone goes far.

I don't use auto stuff because I think it enhances stupidity and ignorance. Like a co-dependency thing. Folks just expect it to work when you turn it on. Like not bothering to check the water in the radiator, or the oil in one's car. It' s a poor excuse for not providing clear, concise information and directions in a readme file or something.

off soap box, appologise for wordiness.

Good initial post.

l2l2

The Giant Wooden Horse Did It!

More alarming still isn't just the fact that is possible to plant such objectionable material on someone elses personal confuser but that the mere threat of doing so is/can/maybe a successful means for blackmail! What I would like to know is how they expect to be able to collect the blackmail money.