Alaska Chat II (avg, protection, sales)

[Rance]

Sweet! I'll live! Unless that astroid hits...then I'm toast. I used Anch as a central target and I believe if I hide behind the mountains I won't even get hit too bad with the shock wave.

[warptman]

This Alaskan is sick of blizzards!


Blizzard Warning

Statement as of 9:14 PM AKST on February 26, 2009

... Blizzard Warning in effect from 3 am Friday to 5 am akst
Saturday...

The National Weather Service in Anchorage has issued a Blizzard
Warning... which is in effect from 3 am Friday to 5 am akst
Saturday. The blizzard watch is no longer in effect.

Another system will begin to impact the coast late tonight with
south winds increasing to 35 to 45 mph after midnight along the coast.
Snow combined with blowing snow will reduce visibilities to one
quarter mile or less at times along the coast tonight and spreading
inland Friday.


Precautionary/preparedness actions...

A Blizzard Warning means severe winter weather conditions are
expected or occurring. Falling and blowing snow with strong winds
and poor visibilities are likely. This will lead to white-out
conditions... making travel extremely dangerous. All travel and
outdoor activity is strongly discouraged.

[Classic Satch]

Originally Posted by bkyhi

Well my computer is behaving for most part again.
Not really sure why but for the last several days it's been getting slower and slower, last night it simply stopped letting me browse the web. In general I think it's been acting 'funny' in general - not just when browsing the web. I was able to download AV and Anti-spyware updates though - so I know it wasn't GCI or my connection.

So far scans came up clean.
I cleaned up a whole bunch of mysterious stuff in my Java cache, and I am able to get online. A bunch of strange cookies from who knows where, even found a .dll file in my temp files. Still scanning with various tools.
Probably my bad, I was a bit behind on my AV updates and anti-spyware updates, and I was searching for various song lyrics - some of those sites try to do funny things. Also got email from my sister-in-law, who's having problems with her email.

I'm beginning to think it may be related to this:

US-CERT Technical Cyber Security Alert TA09-051A -- Adobe Acrobat and Reader Vulnerability

and maybe even this:

TROJ_PIDIEF.IN - Description and solution

A critical vulnerability has been identified in Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 and earlier versions. This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this issue is being exploited.
Adobe is planning to release updates to Adobe Reader and Acrobat to resolve the relevant security issue. Adobe expects to make available an update for Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 by March 11th, 2009. Adobe is planning to make updates for Adobe Reader 7 and 8, and Acrobat 7 and 8, available by March 18th.

Watch out there in web-land.

I would have never said this as recently as 2 months ago but I will now. Norton Internet Security is the least intrusive, most thorough security software I've ever used.

I used to be a rabid hater of Norton because it would infest every segment of your registry and system. Apparently, they've taken the complaints to heart. After extensive research, I decided to drop the money on the new Norton software. WOW! They've learned from their mistakes.

It's CPU and RAM footprint is absolutely minimal. Plus, you can easily deactivate active anti-virus scanning and background tasks, as is usually recommended when playing a serious game.

I know my sh*t when it comes to computers and I heartily recommend the new Norton software. You can install it on 3 different PC's and I've seen it going for as low as $40-50.

Honestly, I never, ever thought I'd be tooting Norton's horn, but hey, quality is quality. (And no, I have absolutely no association with that company in any way-shape-manner.)

[bkyhi]

Originally Posted by Classic Satch

I would have never said this as recently as 2 months ago but I will now. Norton Internet Security is the least intrusive, most thorough security software I've ever used.

I used to be a rabid hater of Norton because it would infest every segment of your registry and system. Apparently, they've taken the complaints to heart. After extensive research, I decided to drop the money on the new Norton software. WOW! They've learned from their mistakes.

Honestly, I never, ever thought I'd be tooting Norton's horn, but hey, quality is quality. (And no, I have absolutely no association with that company in any way-shape-manner.)

I also personally didn't like Nortons for myself, but I do see they've cleaned it up a lot. Smaller footprint, lower cpu load - good stuff. I had started using Norton's when it first came out - of course back then even McAfee was good. However, I frequently do recommend it for friends and others. It works pretty well, was for most part user friendly, and very easy to find someone else who's had just about every problem I'd run across - made the free support I've given away a bit easier. I've sold a lot of Norton's by recommendation. I also have no connection.

We used to use corporate Norton's where I worked over 2400 licenses, corp license even allowed employees to use it at home - that's probably changed now. I did take it off the firewalls though - was letting far too much in and had a heavy cpu load - that was on dedicated FW AV servers - all those boxes did was scan. Symantec even finally gave up and pulled the firewall product. Even on the desktops and servers we had at least two occasions where it let viruses pass - it even knew about the particular viruses but still didn't stop 'em. I remember the guys spending a few hours cleaning up from one of those messes. Had some good corp administrative things - we had desktops and servers update through our internal intranet servers not directly from Symantec - kept traffic down a lot and we would update daily. Didn't run any AV on any of the specialized linux boxes though. That might be a bit different these days. But I'm out of that field now and am happy to say - I'm not that concerned what the guys back there may be doing.

Hey, there is even AV for the IBM AS/400 iseries. Not that the OS/400 - i5/OS itself gets infected, but those boxes are used to host a number of different file systems these days, and it's nice to keep those clean at the source.

As far as my recent problems - completely my bad. I had totally turned off all protections while installing some stuff which had problems with the AV/Anti-spyware - simply forgot to turn them back on. I kept the protections off during reboots as rebooting is part of many window apps installation.

So - bottom line - I agree, Norton's, already fairly good has fixed many of the serious major problems/issues. I feel better recommending it now than before. Though my sister-in-law still manages to get infected by something even while running it. Go figure.

[Barkingowl]

Hmm... Bloated anti virus software or buy a mac with few to no virus issues. It was a no brainer for me.

[Nephler]

There are many time's I wish I have bought a Mac this last time. Oh well, maybe next.

There are a few more virus's written for Mac's now a days, but the ones for windoz out number them 20 to 1. I've never had any issues with viruses or spyware, I just watch what's going on. That and I do this crap for a living.

[Barkingowl]

Ed I have anti virus software on my mac but in the 5 years that I've owned it, its only discovered a single corrupted printer file.

[Nephler]

I setup an education lab with all Mac's last year. That's when it turned my thinking towards Mac's for myself. They really are far superior to windoz, and ease of setup, even in a Windoz Active Directory Network, is a snap.

[Barkingowl]

I'm getting ready to upgrade my desktop to one of the dual quad core macs.

[Nephler]

What I really liked about the macs was that the underlaying command line OS is Unix based, not DOS. That is the main reason macs are much more stable and don't crash or lockup. And now that they run on Intel, they can run just about any application you want.