Month: September 2012

With attacks on banking sites of late this needed to be said.

Talk about a scary phenomenon. Through a virus or worm, a criminal takes over your PC, which behaves normally until it receives instructions over the Internet to mass mail spam, take down a company’s network as part of a DDoS attack or log your keystrokes to gain access to your bank account. When it’s done, your system reverts to acting like a normal PC.

You can’t easily tell if your PC has been zombified. The usual malware warning signs — computer slowdowns, odd behavior — apply to zombies, though they could easily be signs of lesser problems. Watch your firewall software for strange outgoing traffic. Run a good anti virus program I recommend Avast it’s free and a lot of Techs use it. Also check out Symantec’s free Norton AntiBot Beta, which specifically looks for bot infections. Still, don’t consider yourself safe in the event that AntiBot doesn’t turn anything up.

Some zombie or bot software can hide itself from virus and malware scanners by installing a rootkit. Free rootkit-revealing software such as Sophos Anti-Rootkit and Sysinternals’ RootkitRevealer can help, err, root those infections out.

Though your ISP can identify zombies among its clientele, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can contact the company’s support staff and reach someone who knows what you’re talking about.

If e-mail bounces back to you with a message that you’ve been blocked, your address may be on a spam blacklist — most likely as a result of being zombified. More than 100 such blacklists exist, and many ISPs use one or more of them to block the IP addresses of known spammers. If you’re on one or two such lists, most of your mail will get through, but some will not.

Even if your e-mail isn’t bouncing, it’s a good idea to find out whether you’ve been blacklisted. First, go to IP Chicken To view the IP address you send out to the world — probably your router’s. Select the displayed address and choose Edit, Copy to copy it to your clipboard.

There are several blacklist reporting sites. My favorite is Robtex. Paste your IP address into the only field on the page, and click Go. Robtex will list a great many blacklist sites. If any of them are red, you’ve got a problem. Use the list’s contact information to find out why you’re on that list and how to get off of it.

Finally, remember that prevention is the best medicine. Keep Windows and your antivirus, firewall and other security software up to date. Those precautions will reduce the chances of infection from almost certain to reasonably unlikely.

Okay I agree getting banned by a forum you love is hard to understand. Although they may have a good reason, what makes this even harder when it’s not exactly your fault for getting banned.

I am not saying I recently got banned for something that I did recently. But after noticing on more than 1 forum I belong to somebody getting banned. I figured it might be time to relay a story or 2 why I got banned on 3 forums. Yes, I am telling you who they are!!!!

Lets begin with Butch Hartman . com as you may or may not know Butch Hartman created such well known series such as The Farly Oddparents and his widely popular latest series T.U.F.F. Puppy. In the days before Nick had their own forum 1,000s flocked to his forum to discuss their favorite Butch Hartman series, which did include Danny Phantom. But in recent years the forum has gone downhill bad. The time I was there they had less than 400 active members, and loosing them all the time. Lets call him Attila the mod, like any show forum they have this no spoiler rule. I am on another site with the same rule. Theres is about 6 weeks, my problem came about on the Butch Hartman forum when not even 6 months after say an episode aired you still couldn’t even talk about in detail. I got banned finally after I posted something about an episode that aired some 13 months earlier That is no joke 13 months after it aired on Nick we still couldn’t talk about it. I admit I was planning on leaving any way, but getting banned because of this made it impossible for me to even stay on that forum.

BBC America . com forum is to date the only forum I ever got banned twice from. The 1st was demanding that they air some comedy series. Which if you ever bought any older BBC DVDs there is a very clear ad on their that says in short BBC America the home for British Comedy. I said in short they could easily be sued for false advertizing. Next thing I knew I got banned. The 2nd time all I did was trying to get some shows they once played back on the air. Once I joined a group who demanded it. All 32 of us got banned, all at the same time. Btw I signed up using 2 different email addresses.

Star Trek . com Okay I like Star Trek, Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: The Next Generation. But I never been to a Scifi Con dressed as any one character, I just own a couple of DVDs and of course the Star Trek films. This actually took place during the run of Star Trek: Enterprise on UPN. This just shows how touchy some producers can be. Look I am a fan of TV, I watch a lot of shows and have quite a few on DVD. It was during that run I began to notice some episodes of Enterprise began using plots of another scifi series Space:1999. Well in this one episode I noticed except for the shuttles they were using and the names of the characters. They were using the exact same script as that episode of Space:1999. I wrote an extensive post, point by point in fact. Neither it or me last 24 hours after posting. They banned me by my IP address

As I have so often said, I get a lot of spam comments according my spam filter 7,707 as of right now. Not to mention the ones my spam filter misses. Which btw I go through, and I do happen to read them. But will I ever post them…NEVER.

But this is about Dumb Spam, just today I got one saying Learn Photography Online. The 3 most stupid words in the English language. I say that because I have been taking photos ever since I was big enough to hold a camera. In fact as I tell everyone the only real way to learn to take a good photo on what ever device you use. Is Practice, practice, practice. Believe me experience is the greatest teacher, and not taking some utterly useless course online.

Which can be found in of all places the Farmers Almanac 2013 edition as strange as it sounds. “When the Sun Takes a Vacation” looks not only at Global Warming, but at the growing theory that we are soon to fact another mini Ice Age. Yep for real. It tells of how conditions now were very similar to where they were before the mini Ice Age (1550 to 1850). When Global Temperatures dropped 1.8 degrees when it because so cold you could actually walk across New York Harbor, and massive Ice Fairs took place on the Thames River in England. When years earlier it was so warm sheep actually grazed in Greenland and wine could be produced in Scotland…and we thought we were warm.

Although the article does not give a definitive answer. It does give us an insight on the controversy that is the weather of late.