When hackers from (or at least through) China brought this website crashing to its knees earlier this week, I learned a valuable lesson: Keep up with patches to popular web applications.
While moving from one web hosting provider to another, I came across a server log that showed a list of failed login attempts, detailing seven days of attempted break-ins near the end of this last September. Fortunately, my password is fairly strong, but it could be a lot better.
I arrived home from work a week or so ago and discovered the oh-so-friendly and wondrous Blue Screen of Death on my Windows XP x64 Dell Precision 470, which bore the foreboding phrase: STOP 0×000000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.
I live and breathe TiVo now, and can’t understand how I lived without it for so many years. Even though I decided to upgrade our TiVo with a larger hard drive a few months ago, I can’t get myself to try some of the potentially destructive backdoor codes. That said, there are a few less-risky [...]
With a swish and flick of my wand, and an incantation of “Tivous Expandiarmus!”, our TiVo’s capacity increased from 35 hours to over 120 hours of recording space.
OK, it wasn’t quite that simple. But, about three and a half hours after I cracked open my Hughes DirecTiVo box, I had finished the job. This was [...]
Stumbled upon a news article about an extortionist who threatened an online gaming website, saying “Your site is under attack… You can send us $40K by Western Union [and] your site will be protected not just this weekend but for the next 12 months,” or, “if you choose not to pay… you will be under [...]
No more is Internet Explorer allowed here at home. From now on Firefox is the browser of choice. Despite the very tight ship — the firewalls, the anti-spyware software, the virus checkers, the network security, the education on accessing websites, downloading software, and opening email attachments, my strict rules and regulations — another spyware application [...]
Here’s an interesting question from a reader:
My Dad got a new computer last week which he had me help set up and configure. One of the things I noticed was that the 40GB hard drive he ordered didn’t seem to be as large as advertised. I checked the drive by accessing Properties in My Computer; [...]
I’m paranoid when it comes to the Internet: email, surfing, downloads, shareware, everything. And I’m not exactly a newbie when it comes to anything computer related. Last night I scanned my system with LavaSoft’s Ad-Aware and discovered ClickSpring’s MediaTicketsInstaller lurking on my computer, proof that even I can get viruses and spyware on my home [...]
My Eudora email client started giving me a strange and frustrating error message the other day. Every time I sent out email, a Winsock network timeout error code 10053 showed up in the Task Errors window. Coincidentally, I had recently installed a few other minor applications so it was almost impossible to easily isolate the [...]
