Friday, October 30, 2009

What's The Most Secure Windows Firewall?

The reason I ask is, Google isn't much help in this most important security matter. What do I recommend to my computer repair business customers who trust my judgement? I don't like to tell a customer that there is no perfect firewall/anti-virus/anti-spyware/anti-rootkit program, even though it's true, as any who has ever read the Phrack e-zine or 2600 magazine knows.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Don't Pay Best Buy To Uninstall Their Adware/Malware/Trial Software

My sister bought a laptop from Best Buy that had a lot of problems almost right away. The Trend Micro combination security/virus scanning software had some error. Also it had ran really slowly and had problems with the 64-bit version of Internet Explorer. Finally, it had a horrendous amount of other garbage installed and trial-ware to boot. Me, being the families system administrator and technical support by default, was at that time out of town on this occasion. Best Buy charged a friend forty dollars to uninstall their junk and fix all the problems she had, when only a mere two months old! (There's a program that can remove most of the junk programs installed on new computers called PC Decrapifier). She could have just returned it to HP, but for various reasons, she didn't want to take that course of action. Ironically, a few months later, and just eighty days before the warranty was ended, another problem with the system's memory cropped up which was fixed for no charge by HP. The screen cracked on its own too! Moral of the story: Best Buy is pretty bad. HP is less awful.

As a general rule, if you want a good computer with hardware that will last, get the business-class models.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Publicly Posted Google Voicemails are listed in Yahoo! Search

Concerning this post, Google Voice Blog: About Voicemail and Privacy

They are still in in Yahoo!, of course, as every SEO'er knows Google is the most strict in removing robots.txt content. Although in this case, Google probably manually edited the results for privacy reasons.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

My Google Wave Invitation Request

Here's what I asked on the Google Wave invitation request web site.
I want to collaborate with others in my corporation in real-time and prefer to use web-based tools to enhance productivity and avoid information being locked up in silos such as inboxes and MS Sharepoint behind a firewall.


What did you ask in your request?