From: newsletter-bounces@thepcgurus.com on behalf of Kevin-PC Gurus
[microdome@seidata.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 10:21 PM
To: jpdurbin@jpdurbin.net
Cc: PC Gurus Newsletter
Subject: GuruNews, Volume 8 Number 3, 1-24-08
Attachments: ATT00011.txt
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Vol. 8, No. 3
1-24-08
1 Combating Spam
2 I live in a van…
3 Cable gaffe, old phones, Linux bug, mobile sleep deprivation
4 Password recovery
5 The right RAM
Spam is by far the biggest problem facing the Internet today. Fully 95% of email traffic in 2007 was spam (http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9831556-16.html) and it’s causing major congestion of the “tubes”, as the esteemed Senator and technological genius Ted Stevens calls it. And the problem is largely the fault of end users.
I receive hundreds of emails every month consisting of cartoons and jokes I’ve seen a thousand times already and hoaxes that were debunked years ago, all from well meaning people who include hundreds, if not thousands of email addresses in either the header (To: field) or in the body of the message. If I were a spammer you’d all be toast.
I also get scads of obvious spam from personal email addresses, indicating that the account in question is set up on an unprotected computer that has been hijacked and is now part of a “bot” network tasked to send out the offers for various creams, pills and devices to “improve” my physique. Some of these improvements would look rather odd on me, indeed ;)
Another reason there’s so much spam is that it’s profitable. Unfortunately spammers can send thousands or even millions of emails a day, without costing them anything more than access to an ISP, and actually sell things to a small percentage of victims. As long as they make money of just 1% of recipients it’s profitable and they’ll continue to do it.
All of these dilemmas are easy to avoid but the average end user either thinks they’re safe because the “ISP protects them” or they only open and send mail to friends. The fact of the matter is that you may be a major factor in all this garbage.
To help curtail the influx of spam you need to do several things. First and foremost is to run an antivirus program and make sure it’s updated on a daily basis, or at least several times a week. Also run antispyware scanners like Spybot and Ad-Aware. Update them and scan with them on a weekly basis and use real-time features like the Spybot Immunize feature.
If your antivirus program of choice also protects from spyware so much the better, but I still recommend using other tools to keep your system clean.
Second you need to protect your email friends, as well as the poor people who have already fallen prey to massively forwarded emails containing their addresses.
To do this, simply send any email to yourself and BCC the recipients. Just click the CC button at the top of the new or forwarded mail and add the addresses from your address book into the BCC field. If you’re only sending to one person you can skip this of course, but you should always do this when sending to multiple people.
To help protect the downline addresses you see listed at the top of these massive forwards just remember when you click on Forward you are creating a new “document” and you can edit it. Scroll to a line just above the start of the actual message, left click to the far right of the offending message and while holding the left mouse button drag the cursor all the way to the top left. That entire section should turn blue (or some other color if you’ve changed your preferences) indicating that is now selected. Release the mouse button and click the Delete key on the keyboard. All of the email addresses in the message will disappear.
Lastly, never ever click on any link in a suspicious email. The “remove me” links at the bottom of a lot of messages do nothing more than verify that yours is a valid address and that you actually read your mail. Clicking a link in a “phishing” email can be downright dangerous.
I’ve said this a hundred times before and I’ll say it again. Your bank, your credit card company, your ISP, your online payment service, your auction service, the IRS, the FBI, the NSA, NOBODY will ever ask you for personal information via email. Ever. If you get an email like that, I don’t care who it says it’s from, delete it.
And by the way, those are the majority of the spam messages sent out by compromised machines on a bot net.
Be safe out there…
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
Charter Cable goofs and deletes 14,000 email accounts:
http://www.nbc5i.com/technology/15115969/detail.html?dl=mainclick
If you’re still packing around an old analog cell phone it will officially become a brick on February 18th:
http://www.lemarssentinel.com/story/1305751.html
Proving that no OS is truly safe from viruses, 10,000 Linux Apache servers infected and spewing malicious code to users:
http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsid=11184&email
Don’t eat, drink anything containing caffeine or use your mobile phone before going to bed:
http://www.mathaba.net/rss/?x=578699
Copy us on the good stuff
Matthew Dattilo
www.mattstodayinhistory.com
Download of the Week
If you're the type of person
who frequently forgets passwords you'll welcome Asterisk Logger. While we looked at a similar program 2 years
ago, this one works on more applications.
It automatically remembers passwords you type into boxes when the
password is hidden by a series of asterisks. A number of programs--including
Outlook Express and MS Outlook--hide passwords in this way, so the program will
remember those passwords. If in the future you forget your password, just run
this program and it reveals it to you.
Keep in mind that Asterisk
Logger will not remember passwords from all applications--only those that use a
dialog box that hides asterisks. And it won't remember passwords you type into
Web sites. Still, it's a great program for those who often forget passwords,
which means most of us. Scroll down for
the download link:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/astlog.html
Art Maley
Email Question of the Week
Q: Hi You all, well I need ur help again. I have a piece of junk (Sony Pcv Rs420) that I want to take the memory out of and put in my HP Pavilion m7560n, is it possible???? Will it work?? Thanks again fer your help.
A: The memory in your old Sony won’t be
compatible with the new HP machine.
Your new PC uses
a faster type memory module. While the old memory might work in the HP,
it would cause the computer to revert to the slower protocol for all of the
memory installed.
Your HP shipped
with 2GB of DDRII RAM and it has 4 memory slots. You could install more
memory in the available slots, but keep in mind that the 32-bit version of the
Windows OS will only recognize a maximum of 3GB of memory. You can check
your memory requirements at www.crucial.com.
Good luck,
Art Maley
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