Friday, February 12, 2010

An ounce of prevention

What I do each month, as noted in prior posts, is download Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), and run a Full Scan. This may be redundant since Microsoft may already be doing this in the background after one downloads the latest updates, but until I know for sure I continue with this monthly run. As noted earlier, this takes a couple of hours or more, but I prefer to err on the side of caution and let it run.


Happy Saint Valentine's Day all.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

More Big Brother: Feds push for tracking cell phones

It's been a good week for Big Brother. We all should be aware of what is going on in Washington and its impact on our own privacy. There are big pluses for doing what the Feds want to do, as in the story in the article from cnet.com. There are also, of course, big negatives, as in invasion of our privacy.

Here is how the article starts out:

"Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the "Scarecrow Bandits" that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.
FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A jury eventually convicted the duo of multiple bank robbery and weapons charges.

Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.

In that case, the Obama administration has argued that Americans enjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that "a customer's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records" that show where a mobile device placed and received calls"

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

MVPS HOSTS file Update Available

If you have followed my advice and installed the MVPS HOSTS file on your system, you need to know that updates become available on a fairly regular basis, and that you have to go out and get the updated file and install it yourself. Once you understand the process, it shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes.

The important thing is that the updates will help you block the latest bad guys. I urge you to bookmark the HOSTS news web site, http://msmvps.com/blogs/hostsnews/default.aspx and to visit it once a week or so, looking out for the latest update. As we have seen and discussed herein, some of the bad guys just rename their programs, for example "2009 bad guy" is probably being renamed "2010 bad guy", and the updated HOSTS file will catch this.

There is an update available today. Go get it!

Monday, February 8, 2010

"PDF My URL"

This is a nice little web site. They perform a very unusual service. It's fast and it's free. I am not sure where you might want to use this, but I think it's a handy site to bookmark and have available for possible future use.

I recommend you go to the site, http://pdfmyurl.com/ and try it. Simply key in a url and click on the icon at the end of the line and presto, you'll get a pdf image of the web site.