So you read the original tabloid story but somehow managed to avoid the REAL story ? The UK Police has confirmed time and time again that Manhunt was found in the VICTIM's house. I suggest you drop this particular example unless you want to prove that not owning Manhunt drives kids to murder, or maybe Manhunt teaches you how to be a victim ?
This is going to be just as distorted as the McDonalds hot coffee story. Yes a copy of Manhunt was found. In the VICTIMS house. The UK Police never tried to blame the sorry hold-up-gone-wrong (which was what it was) on manhunt, but the tabloids keep repeating falsehoods... Mass media is problematic everywhere, not just in the US. They (the mass media) are writing lies because they can get away with it (i.e. little chance of getting sued AND their usual readership doesn't give a damn if it's true or not). And so the lie gets picked up and spread by other people/media.
Actually, I've managed to stop the fan even under full load (when Cool 'n Quiet doesn't work). The important part is the temperature, and undervolting the cpu can drop the temp quite a bit. The important thing is that the Athlon64 can be made to run REALLY cool, while it is already a cool processor to begin with. So I don't have to use loud fans to cool it, that's why it's so fantastic for "quiet" pc's. I've lost count of the number of people who have asked me for recommendations to lower the noise of their jet-engine-screaming prescott towers.
And no worries about heat production either. I just assembled a quiet pc for a customer, containing the Athlon64 3000+. Boy what a cool chip. I used a 80mm 1800 rpm fan instead of the default and still it gets really cool. In fact on the motherboard I used, Asus K8V, there's a Q-Fan technology that lowers the speed of the cpufan according to the temp, and the fan regularly stops completely. And yes, this is by design. When not under load, the cpu temp actually goes UNDER the case temp if you disable Q-Fan and thus let the fan run at its full 1800 RPM (very quiet BTW). On top of that, it's real easy to undervolt the cpu, so you can run it at 2.0 gigahertz (3000+) and lower the voltage from 1.55V to 1.30V, this gives another big bonus in temps. The largest temp I saw while running under full load was 42 degrees celsius, the lowest 32. At the same time Intel has serious problems with heat, AMD seems to have made their coolest chip in years. Anyone else have positive experiences with this ?
Regarding CoolWeb we'd better skip the DDOS phase and go straight to beating the shit out of their employees with various blunt instruments, I call dibs on their "CEO". I just cleaned up a family's pc where the children got a fullscreen popup without any controls of naked 12-14 year olds, every single time they logged on. Courtesy of CoolWebSearch. That company is made up of a bunch of sick individuals, and they've perfected their "art" of drive-by-installing their spyware so much that the latest versions (there's about twenty different ones) are harder to get rid of than most virusses.
You might also want to try undervolting your cpu. At it's rated speed, it probably does not need the default voltage specified, and each 0.025 Volt you can lower it (my Abit KR7A mainboard handles core voltage in steps of 0.025), you gain 1 or two degrees celsius. I can undervolt my old Athlon XP 1700+ to 1.60 volt from the standard 1.75 and it makes my processor about 7 degrees cooler than usual under load, and it's free. You do have to make sure your processor is still stable at the lower voltage, I use Prime95 to make sure my cpu does not make a single error even under stress.
The biggest factor for these kinds of perpetuating myths about AMD instability seems to be errors in mainboard chipsets. The thing is, Intel makes their own chipsets and even a lot of their own mainboards, while AMD has (almost) always left this up to third parties like VIA, Sis etc. Now while these firms do their best, they occasionally blunder and the result will be less than stable mainboards. And ofcourse uninformed people will always blame the cpu when it's in fact the mainboard/chipset that's the culprit.
Oh come on, I'm an atheist myself but you KNOW that christians and are sensitive to statements like that. So putting that in your sig is one big troll. There is no God. You know it, I know it. Let's leave it at that, 'mkay ?
Yeah, and most of the small time spyware removers that DO work copied their database from the Spybot and Adaware apps, and then have the gall to ask for money.
It probably is, however the biggest number I've seen with MY customers (about 30 average Joes and Janes) is about 1400, spread over four user accounts (so a lot of it was duplicate stuff). 4600 traces of spyware is an ungodly amount, I had hours and hours of clean up work with the 1400 one. 90% of spyware can be automatically cleaned with Spybot and Adaware, but the remaining 10% can be a tough cookie to get rid of permanently.
Well, to each his own. I use Opera for all my browsing these days, and the number of pages that are rendered wrong seems to keep diminishing. I tried an Opera 6.xx version on my ISP's webpages a year ago, it didn't render the tree-like menu that the site uses to navigate correctly, the submenus couldn't be expanded and it was basically useless. Somewhere along the road Opera fixed this (although I bet it was my ISP's web"master" who was to blame), and I can now use it exactly like in Explorer. I now rarely fire up Explorer, mostly for my Online Banking. Most banks seem to have trouble supporting IE, let alone some other browser.
Nice video game, I've got the cheat code too : type "shutdown -a" in Start/Run to abort the shutdown. I probably should have told you earlier but you were having so much fun trying to beat the worm:D
That's why the smart thing to do is to use as many security approaches at the same time as possible. Get a virus scanner, making sure it's updated as fast as possible. Get a firewall, a hardware one preferably but a software one is better than nothing. Make sure the hardware firewall is also up to date in firmware/patches, and get regular updates for the software one too. Install a spyware scanner to deal with that kind of dirt accumulating, because the sheer number of badly programmed spyware can bring an otherwise clean box to its knees. Finally, try to keep up to date with Windows patches, even if you have to unroll the occasional unstable patch.
This is what I use for any of my clients, and it does work since I usually spend my time during "major" virus/worms outbreaks by reading/posting on slashdot, instead of trying to dam a tidal wave of computer and network troubles. When a worm like this hits, I have the time to check on all my clients, in my own tempo, in order to make sure their patches are still up to date. Because the firewall is temporarily protecting them from the exploits, I can do this without them even noticing there is some kind of worm epidemic going on (until they read the papers and call me asking why they don't have problems while the firm next door had to close, some of them even think it's suspicious that they're not getting hammered:D).
I still have to get out once in a while, but instead of racing to limit the damage to my clients, I can keep myself to merely maintenance, and they don't lose time and money while I do it.
Sure, someday something will come out which bypasses all my security measures, but I can rest safe in the knowledge that at that point I can immediately deal with that (hopefully rare) situation, instead of having to first make time between cleanup rounds of previous virusses/worms.
You cannot expect to be forever free of these kinds of threats, but you sure can limit the amount of work by taking some preventive measures and trying to approach the problems from as many angles as possible. There is a huge difference between one major virus incident in three years an one every tree months.
Actually, I hate this "functionality". It's great in theory, but in practice it's nigh on impossible for "ordinary" users to know which program should be allowed access and which not. If "IEXPLORE.EXE" wants access, you can sorta guess it's Internet Explorer. But what's "MSIMN.EXE" ? (Answer : Outlook Express). "SVCHOST.EXE" ? Services under 2000/XP. "CCAPP.EXE" ? Part of Norton Antivirus. "SVCHOST32.EXE" ? Mimail worm. Oops.
I tend to install the free ZoneAlarm version for other people, but I always tell them to click "Yes" and "Remember my choice" on any dialogs that ZoneAlarm pops up. Why ? Because otherwise they WILL at some point inadvertantly block Internet Explorer or Messenger and call me to complain that these apps don't work. I simply cannot expect these people to succesfully find out for each of these cryptic 8.3 DOS style names which program they really are.
So I concentrate on preventing and removing spyware/virusses in the first place. I still use Zonealarm for blocking incoming connections, but they sure have to provide more usefull information if they want ordinary people to decide what's a good program and what's a bad program trying to connect.
But that's the point. They won't do that. Instead of having the one time small pleasure of torturing ONE imbecile, they'd rather use him as part of their undead legions, who can smite anything on the Net that even looks funny at them. His pc is far more interesting as a launch platform for attacks against people who do try to secure their networks and who (usually) DO have something worthwhile to attack. Morons like this are quite a bit more rare than 'normal' people, who will try to protect their pc's even if they fail utterly at it in practice.
Actually, you'd likely get promoted to management and get lots more money, provided you can spout enough gibberish about "synthesizing core energies" and other such things.
You should read the comments of the Spybot S&D developer on his webpage about how many "commercial" spyware scanners simply copy his hard worked on spyware database database which is FREE and then ask money for it. Some of them even include spyware of their own. Spyware is starting to become as worse a problem as email spam. Maybe even worse since email is always restricted to email, the inventivity of spyware developers to find new nooks and crannies for their spyware doesn't seem to have any limits.
I recommend HijackThis, it will list everything it finds at all the nooks and crannies that spyware programs use to hook themselves into the system. Note that most lines will be for LEGITIMATE programs/system functions, so select carefully what you want to remove. In any case, I find it real easy to determine what's good and what's not, based on program names and directories. There hasn't been any spyware that I couldn't disable this way, though I usually run Spybot S&D first to take care of the easy and older ones.
Get the very latest version of the Shredder, or wait for a new one if it can't deal with the new CWS. CWS gets updated far more regularly than even Microsoft security patches (heheh) and it's getting sneakier and sneakier, it's almost a virus by now. You might also want to install Spywareblaster to prevent the thing from reinstalling every time you visit certain webpages (this might be what's happening), plus there's always HijackThis, if you know what you're doing.
Yeah, I've had some trouble with slashdot DNS, everything else seemed to work fine, only slashdot was affected... Was quite a surprise to me how annoyed I was that I couldn't get my hourly fix, must be getting addicted:D
Slashdot Mirror
So you read the original tabloid story but somehow managed to avoid the REAL story ? The UK Police has confirmed time and time again that Manhunt was found in the VICTIM's house. I suggest you drop this particular example unless you want to prove that not owning Manhunt drives kids to murder, or maybe Manhunt teaches you how to be a victim ?
This is going to be just as distorted as the McDonalds hot coffee story. Yes a copy of Manhunt was found. In the VICTIMS house. The UK Police never tried to blame the sorry hold-up-gone-wrong (which was what it was) on manhunt, but the tabloids keep repeating falsehoods... Mass media is problematic everywhere, not just in the US. They (the mass media) are writing lies because they can get away with it (i.e. little chance of getting sued AND their usual readership doesn't give a damn if it's true or not). And so the lie gets picked up and spread by other people/media.
Yep, that was what I meant. Doh !
Actually, I've managed to stop the fan even under full load (when Cool 'n Quiet doesn't work). The important part is the temperature, and undervolting the cpu can drop the temp quite a bit. The important thing is that the Athlon64 can be made to run REALLY cool, while it is already a cool processor to begin with. So I don't have to use loud fans to cool it, that's why it's so fantastic for "quiet" pc's. I've lost count of the number of people who have asked me for recommendations to lower the noise of their jet-engine-screaming prescott towers.
And no worries about heat production either. I just assembled a quiet pc for a customer, containing the Athlon64 3000+. Boy what a cool chip. I used a 80mm 1800 rpm fan instead of the default and still it gets really cool. In fact on the motherboard I used, Asus K8V, there's a Q-Fan technology that lowers the speed of the cpufan according to the temp, and the fan regularly stops completely. And yes, this is by design. When not under load, the cpu temp actually goes UNDER the case temp if you disable Q-Fan and thus let the fan run at its full 1800 RPM (very quiet BTW). On top of that, it's real easy to undervolt the cpu, so you can run it at 2.0 gigahertz (3000+) and lower the voltage from 1.55V to 1.30V, this gives another big bonus in temps. The largest temp I saw while running under full load was 42 degrees celsius, the lowest 32. At the same time Intel has serious problems with heat, AMD seems to have made their coolest chip in years. Anyone else have positive experiences with this ?
Regarding CoolWeb we'd better skip the DDOS phase and go straight to beating the shit out of their employees with various blunt instruments, I call dibs on their "CEO". I just cleaned up a family's pc where the children got a fullscreen popup without any controls of naked 12-14 year olds, every single time they logged on. Courtesy of CoolWebSearch. That company is made up of a bunch of sick individuals, and they've perfected their "art" of drive-by-installing their spyware so much that the latest versions (there's about twenty different ones) are harder to get rid of than most virusses.
You might also want to try undervolting your cpu. At it's rated speed, it probably does not need the default voltage specified, and each 0.025 Volt you can lower it (my Abit KR7A mainboard handles core voltage in steps of 0.025), you gain 1 or two degrees celsius. I can undervolt my old Athlon XP 1700+ to 1.60 volt from the standard 1.75 and it makes my processor about 7 degrees cooler than usual under load, and it's free. You do have to make sure your processor is still stable at the lower voltage, I use Prime95 to make sure my cpu does not make a single error even under stress.
The biggest factor for these kinds of perpetuating myths about AMD instability seems to be errors in mainboard chipsets. The thing is, Intel makes their own chipsets and even a lot of their own mainboards, while AMD has (almost) always left this up to third parties like VIA, Sis etc. Now while these firms do their best, they occasionally blunder and the result will be less than stable mainboards. And ofcourse uninformed people will always blame the cpu when it's in fact the mainboard/chipset that's the culprit.
That's where you use DOSBox, a DOS emulator (mainly) for old games. It doesn't play all dos games yet but every release gets better.
Oh come on, I'm an atheist myself but you KNOW that christians and are sensitive to statements like that. So putting that in your sig is one big troll. There is no God. You know it, I know it. Let's leave it at that, 'mkay ?
Yeah, and most of the small time spyware removers that DO work copied their database from the Spybot and Adaware apps, and then have the gall to ask for money.
It probably is, however the biggest number I've seen with MY customers (about 30 average Joes and Janes) is about 1400, spread over four user accounts (so a lot of it was duplicate stuff). 4600 traces of spyware is an ungodly amount, I had hours and hours of clean up work with the 1400 one. 90% of spyware can be automatically cleaned with Spybot and Adaware, but the remaining 10% can be a tough cookie to get rid of permanently.
Well, to each his own. I use Opera for all my browsing these days, and the number of pages that are rendered wrong seems to keep diminishing. I tried an Opera 6.xx version on my ISP's webpages a year ago, it didn't render the tree-like menu that the site uses to navigate correctly, the submenus couldn't be expanded and it was basically useless. Somewhere along the road Opera fixed this (although I bet it was my ISP's web"master" who was to blame), and I can now use it exactly like in Explorer. I now rarely fire up Explorer, mostly for my Online Banking. Most banks seem to have trouble supporting IE, let alone some other browser.
Nice video game, I've got the cheat code too : type "shutdown -a" in Start/Run to abort the shutdown. I probably should have told you earlier but you were having so much fun trying to beat the worm :D
Maybe it's because we've all got his sig blocked due to spam ? ;)
No, the whole idea of SDI was to burn money. Possibly lasers were involved with igniting the huge piles of money, but that's about as far as they got.
That's why the smart thing to do is to use as many security approaches at the same time as possible. Get a virus scanner, making sure it's updated as fast as possible. Get a firewall, a hardware one preferably but a software one is better than nothing. Make sure the hardware firewall is also up to date in firmware/patches, and get regular updates for the software one too. Install a spyware scanner to deal with that kind of dirt accumulating, because the sheer number of badly programmed spyware can bring an otherwise clean box to its knees. Finally, try to keep up to date with Windows patches, even if you have to unroll the occasional unstable patch.
:D).
This is what I use for any of my clients, and it does work since I usually spend my time during "major" virus/worms outbreaks by reading/posting on slashdot, instead of trying to dam a tidal wave of computer and network troubles. When a worm like this hits, I have the time to check on all my clients, in my own tempo, in order to make sure their patches are still up to date. Because the firewall is temporarily protecting them from the exploits, I can do this without them even noticing there is some kind of worm epidemic going on (until they read the papers and call me asking why they don't have problems while the firm next door had to close, some of them even think it's suspicious that they're not getting hammered
I still have to get out once in a while, but instead of racing to limit the damage to my clients, I can keep myself to merely maintenance, and they don't lose time and money while I do it.
Sure, someday something will come out which bypasses all my security measures, but I can rest safe in the knowledge that at that point I can immediately deal with that (hopefully rare) situation, instead of having to first make time between cleanup rounds of previous virusses/worms.
You cannot expect to be forever free of these kinds of threats, but you sure can limit the amount of work by taking some preventive measures and trying to approach the problems from as many angles as possible. There is a huge difference between one major virus incident in three years an one every tree months.
Actually, I hate this "functionality". It's great in theory, but in practice it's nigh on impossible for "ordinary" users to know which program should be allowed access and which not. If "IEXPLORE.EXE" wants access, you can sorta guess it's Internet Explorer. But what's "MSIMN.EXE" ? (Answer : Outlook Express). "SVCHOST.EXE" ? Services under 2000/XP. "CCAPP.EXE" ? Part of Norton Antivirus. "SVCHOST32.EXE" ? Mimail worm. Oops.
I tend to install the free ZoneAlarm version for other people, but I always tell them to click "Yes" and "Remember my choice" on any dialogs that ZoneAlarm pops up. Why ? Because otherwise they WILL at some point inadvertantly block Internet Explorer or Messenger and call me to complain that these apps don't work. I simply cannot expect these people to succesfully find out for each of these cryptic 8.3 DOS style names which program they really are.
So I concentrate on preventing and removing spyware/virusses in the first place. I still use Zonealarm for blocking incoming connections, but they sure have to provide more usefull information if they want ordinary people to decide what's a good program and what's a bad program trying to connect.
But that's the point. They won't do that. Instead of having the one time small pleasure of torturing ONE imbecile, they'd rather use him as part of their undead legions, who can smite anything on the Net that even looks funny at them. His pc is far more interesting as a launch platform for attacks against people who do try to secure their networks and who (usually) DO have something worthwhile to attack. Morons like this are quite a bit more rare than 'normal' people, who will try to protect their pc's even if they fail utterly at it in practice.
Actually, you'd likely get promoted to management and get lots more money, provided you can spout enough gibberish about "synthesizing core energies" and other such things.
Yes, but the number one hit would still be parent post. And the gazillion slashdotters proclaiming "zlxrt" to be a stupid name. Begin in 3..2..1..
You should read the comments of the Spybot S&D developer on his webpage about how many "commercial" spyware scanners simply copy his hard worked on spyware database database which is FREE and then ask money for it. Some of them even include spyware of their own. Spyware is starting to become as worse a problem as email spam. Maybe even worse since email is always restricted to email, the inventivity of spyware developers to find new nooks and crannies for their spyware doesn't seem to have any limits.
I recommend HijackThis, it will list everything it finds at all the nooks and crannies that spyware programs use to hook themselves into the system. Note that most lines will be for LEGITIMATE programs/system functions, so select carefully what you want to remove. In any case, I find it real easy to determine what's good and what's not, based on program names and directories. There hasn't been any spyware that I couldn't disable this way, though I usually run Spybot S&D first to take care of the easy and older ones.
Get the very latest version of the Shredder, or wait for a new one if it can't deal with the new CWS. CWS gets updated far more regularly than even Microsoft security patches (heheh) and it's getting sneakier and sneakier, it's almost a virus by now. You might also want to install Spywareblaster to prevent the thing from reinstalling every time you visit certain webpages (this might be what's happening), plus there's always HijackThis, if you know what you're doing.
Yeah, I've had some trouble with slashdot DNS, everything else seemed to work fine, only slashdot was affected... Was quite a surprise to me how annoyed I was that I couldn't get my hourly fix, must be getting addicted :D