Protecting Your Computer

Twenty years ago, there were few people who owned a personal computer (PC). It was a luxury to have one, and even then there wasn’t much you could do on it. There were one or two great games, and maybe dad could do some work at home instead of spending night after night at work.

Ten years ago the revolution was well under way. Having a home computer was rather like having a microwave oven, pretty much every had one, and if you did, you were looking to upgrade to a newer model. But that was only the beginning. Microwave ovens cannot be hobbled by virii that seek to cause mischief, send pornography to everyone on your mail address list, or generally cause so much havoc you have to reinstall the operating system.

Fast forward to today. I liken computers to newborn babies, well, newborn babies born in the middle of nowhere. With no human contact a baby can grow up pretty much normally, experience life with joy and happiness, maybe have a family, and not experience the horrific nature of disease we constantly battle. However, babies are NOT born in the middle of nowhere, they are usually born in hospitals or in the case of third world countries, in villages, or with extended families.

So what do hospitals/doctors do now? They insist on your children having shots after shots, to protect them from a myriad of diseases. This is a safety issue of course, and a sensible bit of prevention to ensure your children grow up disease-free, to have their own children. You wouldn’t want your children to die prematurely would you? So why would you not take the same precautions with something else you value (although not as much as a life)?

Assuming you don’t construct your own from spare parts, and that you buy one from a chain store, you will get a complicated piece of hardware that has all the operating system software installed on it. It is “ready to go”. Well, almost. The vast majority of the computers sold now have the latest Microsoft operating system on them, usually XP. This has some rudimentary protection systems on it, but honestly that’s all they are - rudimentary.

XP does come with a simple firewall which you can turn on or off, but if you are serious about protecting your computer and what it contains you should give some thought to getting a commercial protection suite. And, not just one. There are two things you really need, we’ll take a look at them.

Anti-Virus Software

Anti-virus software is just that, it protects your computer from virii. Most often, this software scans your incoming emails, comparing any attachments with an internal database of virii. If it finds one, it usually “quarantines” the offending email and prevents you from looking at it or opening the attachment. Also, many modern anti-virus softwares also look at any web pages you are viewing, checking those as well. These databases of virii are constantly updated, because so many virii emerge every day - you can set your software up to download new versions to keep updated.

There are so many anti-virus software packages available that you can become easily confused as to which is the “best”. Generally speaking they are all good, and they all keep an up-to-date virus database. Differences in cost are down to small differences in the package, auto-updates, hard drive backups, and a multitude of small but sometimes helpful ancillary uses.

This author uses a software package that is, to be honest with you, head and shoulders above the rest. It is called Panda, found here. Not only is it highly configurable, unintrusive to daily computer use, but it protects incoming and outgoing email, your browsing habits, and it very rigorous when it comes to protection.

Malware, Spyware, Adware

These nasty pieces of programming are the result of marketing genius gone bad. Many years ago marketers used to send out surveys to find out the habits of the general public, but now they don’t even need to expend that energy. Now, a small program can be deposited on your computer and sit there quietly observing your online habits, where you shop, the sites you visit, the people you mail, the ads you click on, and then mail it all back to the marketing companies.

You wouldn’t EVER consent to downloading one of these would you? No? Wrong. You probably already have. It’s in one of those bits of fine print that the VAST majority of us never read, that permits a site to upload the offending software onto your computer.

Ok so what is so bad about these spies? Well they don’t overtly do anything to your computer but they DO steal a bit of memory and CPU time, and if you have a lot of them on your computer you will see a noticeable decrease in the speed and responsiveness of your silicon servant. It’s not much to those of us who have fast computers but to the average computer user it can actually be a real drag! Look at it this way - the average computer has 128Mb of memory, and let’s assume each bit of spyware, on average, consumes 1Mb. If you have 20 of them, that’s 1/6th of your computer’s resources, a significant portion when you consider that opening Internet Explorer consumes ~30Mb.

How can you fix this invasion of privacy? Well there are computer programs that rid you of these pesky invaders, temporarily at least. If you don’t change your browsing habits you will get more of them. This link will lead you to one of the best free anti-spyware programs available:

http://security.kolla.de/

Firewalls

Firewalls are pieces of software designed to prevent unauthorized access to or from a network. Generally speaking if you use a personal firewall on your computer you can tailor what sites do and don’t get into your computer, or on the other side of the coin, what sites you can and can’t get to (useful for
child protection).

Like the anti-virus software selection there is a wide variety of firewalls to choose from. This author has tried several and now uses just one exlusively to protect his network, ProtoWall.

Many of the early versions of firewalls were resource hogs - in that they used nearly all of the computer’s resources (memory and cpu) to protect the computer. This is clearly unacceptable as it prevents the user from actually using the computer! Modern firewalls however are far more efficient and ProtoWall’s use
can barely be felt. You can download ProtoWall from this site:

http://www.bluetack.co.uk/

You should be aware however, that the use of this requires some knowledge of computers, and how to operate them competently. More importantly this is one piece of software that does require manual updates, as the nature of hackers, computers, networks, are that they change frequently. You need an accompanying software program called the Blocklist Manager to download newer IP ranges to use in conjunction with ProtoWall. The site cited above has that software as well, and there are extensive help files and message forums to help you get it
set up.
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A couple of months ago I got a new cellphone, which has been working just fine until a few days ago. Now whenever someone calls they get a busy signal, and I get a busy signal dialing out, no matter who I’m calling. I called Cingular last night and explained the problem, they didn’t sound at all surprised. The first guy I talked to said, “Well, that’s an older model phone” … and he said it as if he expected me to say, “Oh, I see, ok thanks, bye.” Instead I said, “Well so is my car but it still gets me from point A to point B.” The guy siiiiiiiiiiiiiiighed and said he would see if he could figure out the problem. (Gosh so sorry to bother you buddy, GRRRRRR number 1) So after he tried to call my phone and got a busy signal and asked me if I was sure I wasn’t on the phone he pulled up my account (for the first time) and said “OH, you’re on a so-and-so plan, that’s another department, let me transfer you” (GRRRRRR number2). I waited on hold for another 10 minutes and when I finally was transferred had to explain the whole thing to the next person. A girl who I could barely hear and to whom I had to say four times “I can barely hear you, can you speak up or put your mouth to the phone?” and who never did speak up…. (GRRRR number 3) ,
looked up my account, said, OH you have an OLDER model. I said yes I have an older model, but I bought it brand new just a couple of months ago, so if it’s so bad why are you guys still selling it? She said that was a good question. Then she said she was going to send a reset signal to my phone, asked me to turn it off then back on, which I did. She then said OK let’s try it out now. So I said OK, and waited on her to try to call the number, like the last guy did. I waited and waited. Then she finally said “Any luck?” I said “What? aren’t you trying to call me?” She said “NO, I’m waiting on you to call someone.” (GRRRRRRR GRRRRRR GRRRRRRRRR) I tried dialing a number and got a busy signal, and told her so. She asked if I was sure the number I was dialing wasn’t busy (OH my patience is really running thin at this point, losing count of the GRRRR’s). I told her yes I’m sure, I tried dialing Time Service, it’s never busy. She tried calling me and asked the same thing as the last guy, did you hang up the phone after you last dialed out? I’m ready to scream at this point. Then she gave me this long drawn out technical explanation about why it was happening, and how many calls they’ve gotten over the last 3 days about the same phone model doing the same thing. I said well if you KNEW this was a problem why am I being treated like an idiot? She explained that she was just trying everything first to make sure it was the same problem, and went on to say that Cingular should have it cleared up over the next week or two. WEEK OR TWO? Then started to thank me for calling and attempted to get me to say “DOH ok thanks bye.” But I said WAIT! I cannot be without my cell phone for a couple of weeks, I’m missing calls from clients who try to reach me when I’m out. She said well there IS something else, we could try reprogramming it I guess. I said well yes can we do that please? She said she had nothing but time. I said well you could have surprised me. So we wen’t through the whole re-programming thing, or we TRIED to… at step 3 the phone wasn’t doing what she was telling me it was supposed to be doing, which was giving me a box to enter some security code into. After her asking if I was SURE the box wasn’t there and me saying, YES IM SURE, she said OHHHH This is an OLDER MODEL! GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!! and told me I would have to take it in to my nearest cingular dealer and thanks for calling, at which point I again said WAIT!!!!!!! STOP! JUST HANG ON! For one thing where IS my nearest Cingular dealer and for another thing what are they going to DO when I take it in? She looked up the address and phone number of my 3 nearest cingular dealers and then told me they would probably give me another phone with a new phone number. New phone number???? I explained that getting a new phone was fine, getting a new number was not, because I just had this number printed on 500 new business cards, and unless they were going to pay for 500 more new business cards AND call everyone who has this number and tell them the new number, there had better be another option. Her reply astonished me…. “Well if you had one of the NEWER models you could simply put the memory chip in the new phone and keep your same number, thank you for calling, good luck.” CLICK. I sat here for 10 minutes just ….. GRRRR…. growling. I told my husband about it, well… in my excitement I actually YELLED to my husband about it, telling him if I didn’t have to get a new number I would just tell CINGULAR to stuff it and go get cellphone service elsewhere altogether. He calmly explained to me that there was a law passed not long ago that cellphone companies HAVE TO give you your same phone number as your recent cellphone if you request it. HMMM, REALLY? Yes, he said, even if you switch companies. I’ve decided that I’ll go ahead and take the phone in to one of my three local Cingular Dealers, and if the service is anything at all like the service I received over the phone, I’ll go to my nearest general cell phone dealer and switch to another provider. SO, my number one rant for the day is Customer Service in general. My number two rant is actually that even though I’m contributing to it, cellphones have become such a huge part of our lives that people like me get extremely bent out of shape when theirs stops working. Everyone has one (except Diane), some people have two, or three even. Don’t get me wrong, I love having a cellphone… when it works… but I hate that I depend on it so much. Remember payphones?

My husband works 12 hour shifts in a chemical plant and the hours are 5 to 5 am to pm, pm to am, depending on nights or days- he works nights one shift, days the next. He also gets FOUR, count them, FOUR 2 week vacations a year- (but that’s another rant;) Anywhoooo- he leaves way too early for me to cook breakfast, I mean, yes, as a homemaker I suppose that’s one of my “duties” but I’ll be damned if you’re catching me at a stove before the crack of dawn. So therein lies the dilemma, what does he do for breakfast? He thinks fast food joints are anathema so that leaves stopping for an Egg McMuffin out of the question, even if they are open that early.

Ten years ago I thought I’d try something I could prepare ahead of time and put in the freezer that he could take with him, and reheat at work easily. I decided on breakfast tacos.

To make these you take a whole pound of hot seasoned pork breakfast sausage, a dozen eggs, and a 1/4 lb of Hot Mexican Velveeta. Cook the sausage scrambled, (don’t drain the grease, have to have something so the eggs won’t stick to the pan), pour in the dozen eggs beaten, stir these in until the eggs are soft cooked, then chunk up the Velveeta, mix that in until it melts or until you have one big gooey mess! You take this and you put it down the center of a flour tortilla, then you add at least a tablespoon of Pace Salsa, roll them up and stick them in a Ziplock bag, put them in the freezer and Voila! Pretty simple.

The thing is ten years ago eggs hadn’t been deemed bad for us, or at least I don’t recall it ten years ago, and everyone knows pork is bad for high blood pressure, and Velveeta, well they have a lot of nerve calling that cheese. Also, who was to know that he would fall immediately and irrevocably in love with them? So for the past TEN years I’ve had to make these damn things weekly, and God forbid if I suggest something else. Now not only are they really a thorn in my side but they’re not the healthiest of items for someone to be eating day after day after day, particularly when they have high blood pressure AND high cholesterol.
I mean has he not ever heard that Variety Is the Spice of Life?

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It never fails that when I say that phrase, “dinner’s ready”, that I recall the scene from the film, Terms of Endearment, where Emma has just found out her husband is STILL cheating on her, and he’s trying to calm her down as she cooks and she turns around and screams- DINNER’S READY- or maybe she just screams DINNER, (been a while since I’ve seen that movie) but whichever it is, I always want to scream it myself. I get SO tired of deciding every day what to cook. Ask the husband or the kids what they want and they usually have no preference or have differing preferences, so it’s left up to me to decide and it’s not easy trying to serve something both healthy and varied day after day after day. Ah hell, who am I kidding? Healthy? My idea of a healthy dinner is serving salad on the side of the meat and potatoes. Then of course how are we to really know what’s healthy for us anymore? It seems that daily there is something that was deemed good for us one day that’s reported as will kill us the next.
When I was in my teens I went through a macrobiotic phase and ate my fair share of brown rice with sea salt for seasoning and rice cakes for snacks (ugh) and I don’t recall being any healthier then than I am now except for the fact I was 30 years younger at that time so I must of been somewhat healthier. Now that would be a varied meal! I can just see the looks on their faces if I were to throw a big bowl of brown rice on the table with some raw broccoli and cauliflower and a bottle of shoyu and tell them to have at it! They’d probably revolt and tie me to the stove until I came to my senses and started broiling a big thick juicy steak, medium rare of course.
I’ve rattled on enough for now though, I need to get off of here and start thinking about what I’m going to cook for dinner.

I’m so so sick of having everything under the sun to protect against viruses and spyware and it’s still not good enough. For virus protection I have Panda and Norton. For spyware I have Spybot, No-Adware, Spy-Ad Exterminator, and SpywareBlaster. Yesterday my daughter used my computer for about 10 minutes. When I got it back I had pop-ups coming up at the speed of light. I ran all my spyware programs, it was still happening. I ran both antivirus programs, still happening. I went around and around in circles trying to get rid of the mess. I even tried a system restore, to no avail. I downloaded another antivirus program, AVG Free Edition… which found 54, that’s right folks, count em!… 54 trojans on my computer. That took care of the problem. But why didn’t Panda or Norton find at least ONE of those same trojans? I realize there is no program which will find them all, but good lord do I really need THREE antivirus programs? Obviously I do. OH WAIT! I forgot about the very small one I have on here and use occasionally, vcleaner, so make that FOUR, in addition to the four spyware programs. They all seem to find something the others don’t find, which is why I’ve ended up with so many. I wish there was just ONE that would find and fix and prevent everything. about provision tramadol allagujas acupunture viagra las charles fuetramadol dihydroxybergamottin 6 and interaction 7xanax aderolid 029 pill xanaxand xanax depression aggravatedtramadol 083cd tramadol aciphex actos cardizem Mapviagra achetertramadol 180 $79cod overnight 200 tramadoltramadol per hcl acetaminophenabout all tramadolversus xanax ambiento xanax addictiedxanax combo adderall Mapfree movies adulterotica free movies sapphicfree wet movie cliptrailers adult movie videoin sex moviesporn movieclip movie wet freelongest movie yard Map