Re: Go fork yourself

Tinman wrote:
Two wrote:
So, I go to that website to take a look at the above link. About 30
seconds later, I get a pop-up from my virus software, warning me
that the website is trying to access credit card information out of
my computer.
Sounds fishy to me. How would it know it is credit card information?

It probably was a phony pop-up. If there is ONE thing I try and drill into people's heads it's to not believe anything a pop-up window says. Just because there's a nice handy "Cancel" button on it, doesn't mean clicking it is canceling anything--often just the opposite. Close it via the (real) "X" and use a pop-up blocker, etc., etc.



Big reasons why I LOVE Firefox AND Thunderbird.......

Firefox blocks pretty much ALL popups, and when the Adblock extension is used Ya don't even get advertisements in most web pages. You can whitelist specific pages or entire sites if you trust them,

Thunderbird tosses most spam into a junk folder, and learns as it goes what you consider to be spam. Stuff it doesn't recognize as spam still lands in yer inbox, but images are not displayed. You have to click a control button to tell it to display images in the message preview pane, and then you also have to click another button telling it the message isn't a scam.....<sfsf>. And you can always hit the <junk> button to watch the message disappear out of yer inbox and magically appear in yer junk folder. You can review the stuff in yer junk folder if ya want, and set a control switch designating how many days messages will stay in the junk folder before they are deleted automagically.

I used Internet Explorer with Outlook (for e-mail) and Outlook Express (for newsgroups) for years and just got frikkin sick of runaway popups, popunders, intrusive advertising, spam I couldn't control, ineffective message filtering, etc.

I used every different spam blocker I could find, some free, some I had to buy....nothing really worked. I did realize early that a lot of spam and virus threats are tied to each other.......<no sfsf>. So I've ALWAYS been a big believer in anti-virus software (I use AVG), firewalls (I use Zonealarm), anti-spyware software (I use Windows Defender, Ad-Aware, Spyware Blaster, and Spyware Search and Destroy)....a LOT of anti-spyware software.

I also do things like automate virus scans daily, complete backups weekly.....and paranoid stuff like using software meeting DoD specs (<sfsf> well it says it does) to shred deleted files, overwriting them. I also keep all these definition files up to date, and run all kinds of utilities on a regular basis to tweak and clean up my system.

I just got in these kinda habits after literally years of running a BBS out of my home which dealt with hundreds of users, and thousands of file transfers and mail bundles. Also from being a non-IT type-a-guy system admin for a lota years of a small industry specific computer network with a variety of software packages being used by some of the MOST technically non-savvy people you've ever know (and THAT might be saying something since most of us know some REALLY non-technical folks <sfsf>).

Early December I bought an inexpensive laptop for use when I travel, or when I do occasionally work <work???>,. It was my first experience with wireless networking (since I bought a wireless hub also). I was freaking AMAZED how many of my neighbor's wireless networks are unsecured so I could just piggyback on them and do pretty much whatever. Mine got locked up tight pretty fast (firewalls, data encryption, and anything else I could think of)...... and I still worry about it a little.

--
Steve Irving (Irv) - BS#237/SLOB#12
http://www.nite.com/bike.html
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