I am so blessed to have a brother; computer expert.

[aquaforce]

I really feel sorry for the schmoes that some people have to deal with when their computer gets messed up. Sometimes I hear their stories and I feel so bad that their experience is so bad due to an idiot that was working on their machine.

Well anyway............ a trojan got through my firewall and for the first time ever I experienced damage from a malicious virus. My brother has taught me pretty well on network systems and I may have been over confident in my own web surfing abilities so when this thing came in on me I was VERY surprised. In the past I have caught things like this trying to get my machine and I would immediately shut it down and reboot for repairs to my software; no prob.
When this thing came in it closed everything I had open on my desktop, highjacked my machine and permanently damaged my hard drive.

My brother stuck a new 160 Gig drive in, ran my old one off another machine to slave off my data and voila!!!!!!!!! I am fixed right back up.
The dirty virus even corrupted my data so when it was moved it would spread again but that is where an expert comes in. Running my drive as a slave it could be scanned and repaired before the malicious evil could work again.

I would love to kick the fool in the balls that made this virus. It is very damaging and it was made to spread through data and most any storage system. Without the abilities of my brother I would have been told my machine was a gonner and that I would have to start all over.


Surf save everyone..........cyber space is cruel sometimes.

 

[stuart]

Perhaps this is just the rant of a resident geek/nerd.

I really enjoy building and rebuilding computers, but I am really frustrated by the way the computer industry in run. All the equipment manufacturers and vendors bow to the almighty Micro$oft, who keeps selling the same cr*ppy windoze year after year. If the vendors got together they could easily make Microsoft change its ways, but they are too busy competing. Since they are all bound by the same chains, none of them has the courage to break out.

Try this and see what happens - go into your big box computer store and ask the price of a computer without windows. A boxed copy of win 7 costs over $200, so they should give you the machine for $200 less without windows, right?

I know that Kubota, John Deere or any other make would not be in business if they offered a product that they knew didn;t work properly and came with no warranty and required you to buy extras you didn't want.

For anything secure here, I use a recent version of Linux, which by its basic design can not have a virus, trojan or whatever. I have seen lots of infected windows machines, and it is very easy to move the infected drive into one of my linux servers and extract the data, overriding all the windows security stuff and avoiding all the 'infections'.

Please excuse the soap box here. Its just that Windows starts off by letting anyone do anything on the computer, then tries to find ways to stop bad things from happening. In a system that promotes 'ease of use' as a selling point, security holes are inevitable, and the crackers take great delight in finding them. Example - Internet Explorer is supposed to have all these things to make us 'safe' on the internet, yet it is the same program as Windows Explorer, that lets us install new programs and move or delete files. Something tells me this is a bad concept, because if the web contents somehow get at the file delete functions......

Linux, by basic design, requires authorization, in advance, to do anything. So an malicious program can not install itself, and web contents can not change files unless you specifically allow it to. It seems so simple and logical a concept.

 

[aquaforce]

The monopoly is not limited to the IT world but who is going to be able to compete against the big moe's or even big brother who has his hands in a lot of pies?


Another attempt was made against my machine tonight earlier. I think I will give Mozilla or Linux a try.
Your right on the microsoft vulnerabilities and I don't need a soft under belly in cyber space.