Mcafee have an interesting page that tells you how much hacking/virus activity has come from the network you are on. The results from my ip at home tells me that 4 ip address’s have been detected – that probably means 4 people in the town I live in and use Pipex are/were infected.
Month: August 2003
In the past couple of weeks I have blogged my thoughts about two pieces of software – Awasu and Zempt. Within 24 hours I’ve had posts from either the writers or users of the software updating me or asking for further comments on the software. This has been due to them monitoring services such as technorati and all the other blog consolidation services. This is what you call customer service and has gave a very good impression of the product and also the ability to update any misunderstandings users of the products actually have. Maybe Microsoft should take note! On the other hand, my experience with Netgear is that I had to wait other two days for a response to my email asking for support and only when I rang them up did I get a (very satisfactory) response to my problem. Spot the difference! I guess it would probably be a lot harder for Netgear or Microsoft to monitor individual blogs and post feedback on them due to the numbers involved – after all a lot more people have Microsoft or Netgear products than Awasu for instance.
Thanks to Tara posting on my comments, I have discovered that the newsfeeds in Awasu are actually available offline as long as you don’t click in the right hand window which contains the headlines of each feed. If you do that, the body page returns a 404 not found as it’s trying to return the individual entry webpage. So you have to click on the feed in the control center window to view them. Apparently it also integrates with mozilla, but I’ll need to investigate that when I’m back on a lan connection to the net and not on a mobile dialup!
I logged a call with Pipex on Sunday @ 7.30pm and had a response back saying they couldn’t find a problem on Monday @ 3.20pm. Sure enough the problem had gone away by then. Annoyingly they asked for a traceroute which I should have given them in the first place but forgot – doh! The support from Pipex has definately improved from that experience!
Further to my post about email address’s needing spam protection Neil pointed me in the right direction. Spam_protect=1 needs to be set (it already was) but to avoid displaying email address’s this needs to be combined with show_email=”0″
What a morning….so far I’ve had 116 notifications that we’ve received the sobig virus into our mail servers. These are running NAV and delete the attachment and were previously configured to send an email (for historical purposes of the quantity of virus’s) and a Windows Net Send Message to my desktop to notify me of the problem. However, with the amount of notifications and also notifications when the manual scan failed to open certain attachments in emails, I was unable to work as I had to keep clicking ok. Therefore I had to turn the notifications off – must remember to turn them back on again.
There would be major resistance in the company to blocking attachments at the mail server so unfortunately that option is a nogo.
At the same time I’ve had to arrange scans on three remote pc’s that managed to get the Blaster or Welchia worms on their machines as they got infected between us updating at 4am with no patch updates, and the 11.30 manual update we initiated!
One of the laptops (from a remote site) has no firewall, runs w2k and no service packs or fixes. I’ve spent the last couple of hours installing sp4,rebooting and installing all the various hotfixes, ie6 and the multiple reboots needed to do them all. WHAT A MORNING!
Thanks toSOBig was very fast spreading and by 12pm we had at least 8 copies in our mailboxes and our antivirus software was updated at 4am in the morning and nothing was found when the emails came through. Thankfully (that I am aware of) the users didn’t open the emails – I guess I’ll find out when I am in the office tomorrow.
Why would someone who’s paid a fortune for one of those phones with the polyphonic ringtones, stick to the annoying nokia ringtune and even worse take forever to answer it at the breakfast table?
Having played with this a bit more tI’ve found that it produces a sig at the bottom of the email to say that the email has been sent using desknow. I’ve not found anywhere in the documentation that is provided with the system which says exactly what is crippled/changed in the free version as opposed to the licenced version. The information on services that are crippled just says it will stop working “after a short while” – not very helpful.
One good thing is the messaging service that is built in – theres also the ability to send a message to everyone that is currently attached to the server although I am not sure if this would be disabled after the trial period is finished.
This lack of information is similar to a favourites synchronisation program I found on the web the other day – this allowed you to synchronise favourites between browsers and computers (although it didn’t seem to be synchronising my firebird favourites properly). It took me a long time searching on their website to find that the software was timebombed to stop working after 30 days unless you paid $50ish, which is an extortionate amount to pay for synchronising bookmarks! This is rather misleading as the main page trumpeted the free software with no smallprint or asterix’s to say “we wait until you are hooked on our app before making it really clear that you hafve to pay”. Having said that the email they sent welcoming you to the service did mention the time bomb but not on the website, which is where you are first hooked in.