TruXter Tech News

Many of us knew of Asquared free. The software that Emsisoft noticed in Google. It was the best malware scanner out there. Well Emsi found it in their best interest to remove their malware scanner and merge it’s code with their virus scanner. I have no idea how long the virus scanner will be free. I do know the virus scanner / Anti virus was trial for as long as I can remember the company site.

There is another way to still get A-squared free, is by downloading the “emergency kit“. and just run it as a stand alone. The Emergency kit was created for usb use. That I.T. guys can float around the office without having to download and install the software on every single infested computer. Also prevent a virus (during the active infection) from directly attaching it’s self to the malware scanner and crippling it.
I was downloading asquared updates yesterday july 26th 2010 during the day at work. When I got home, it was off the site. I tried to update my home pc but was prompted with a notice of the change and would have to uninstall and that a-squared would no longer scan for me.

By now you understand I got an infection while at work and got spooked by it by the time I got home right? Well I am running the emergency kit. So far found 4 viruses that Norton didn’t find, malware bytes didn’t find and that S&D didn’t find. In fact they all showed I was clean. Even though I got the fake virus scanner prompt on this antiquated operating system (XP).

For those who do not know what the H.R.6123 bill is, let me break it down for you.
There was a girl who was stalked , and flirted with by a woman pretending to be a boy the same age as the girl. The woman was the mother of another girl who lost a cheer leading contest to the stalked girl. The woman flirted with the stalked girl then one day got very cold and mean to the girl. Girl killed herself. Here is the bill on Open Congress.
I totally agree that the family of the child who killed herself need some sort of comfort knowing the death of their child can be turned into something good. I would want the same, but these people who are backing this do not understand how the internet works. The description is to broad and vague. There are tons of boys and girls who learn so much every day with just a simple battle of witts. Arguing, flaming and trolling on the internet. It opens their minds to a new range of thought. Without conflict and contrast, we all agree. If we all agree we do not learn from each other. Some people learn from a pleasant suggestion, many learn from brute force. Telling someone they are a moron for thinking the world is flat, pretty much tells the world ” hey don’t bother with this thread, this guys is a joke” . If it was not for the flamers, our world would only be trolls.
Here is an explanation of a troll .
Trolls are people who post false information, not always to harm anyone, but to just get some sort of thrill out of confusing people, or misleading and or misinforming. Flamers are people who tell them to “stfu gtfo” if “H.R.6123″ is passed, then the trolls are left and the flamers are lobotomized. The problem of the troll or some corrupt evil rude person is left to the owner of the site to liable for.
The last frontier will have a flag in it that claims ” you can not argue, you can not fight you will go to jail”.

This bill needs to be scrapped. In fact, any bill that The ex president’s wife tries to pass is a publicity stunt and needs to be looked at again, she is the one who backed jack Thompson, and then stopped associating as soon as she ran for president. She just used that Censorship stunt to get the attention of the elderly who have no idea what computers are good for . People who lived full happy lives without it. But forgot that by the time she hit the polls, the kids she turned against, where old enough to vote now.

This “H.R.6123″ needs to be rejected and a statue of the girl harmed needs to be put up at her school in her memory. The school is where it started. Let’s not remove the world’s freedom for the satisfaction of revenge on one lady. What one calls a bully, others call em a punk. Know there are things going on that balance it 90% of the time.

Notice I say no one’s name.. In case this bill is accepted.

I received this mail from liberty Names of America , also known as lnoa
The mail goes like this:

As a courtesy we would like to remind you that it is time to renew your domain name which is expiring soon. Failure to renew your domain will result in losing exclusive rights to it on the web and losing access to your online presence. By moving your domain to Liberty Names Of America, you can take advantage of the savings we have to offer. Your renewal will start from the day your domain name expires, even th you are signing up months earlier.

It goes on to shoot prices at me for my domain name. Saying that truxtertech.com will go for one year at $29 , two years at $49 and five years at $94.
I can not help but laugh in disgust. I pay 6.99 a year through netfirms for one of my other domain names. I could switch my domain myself for $150 for 10 years at bravenet.com
The people I am registered through for this current domain name is powweb.com I pay $94 a year for unlimited storage space and bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, 75 mysql databases and the domain name is free. My bill is automatically charged to my account before expiration. They can’t help lower my costs any. Why would I want to even consider Liberty Names ? They make it clear that they are not forcing me to re-up on my domain name. But the mail does look like it would be scary to someone who is new to this planet. Not that this an advertisement but hey, if you register through powweb, Let them know you read about their deal from me, I get a kick back from that stuff and it would help out a whole lot.

Well just a heads up to anyone who is doing a search in google for that dang company. They are not the registrants of your domain …. yet, So you might want to head back to where you first bought that domain and pay up. some companies might squat on it and turn it into a spam site. I lost truxter.org that way years ago. Bought it late last year and it has been a hard battle to get it back into search engines.
Is Liberty Names Of America a Scam ? I dunno, but their prices are far out of my reach.
Here’s what other’s think
Search That’s to see rip off Claims
This is to see people calling them a scam.
Others saying they are overpriced

There has been an advertisement on Television lately that I have seen coming up repeatedly. The advertisement talk of a program called “finallyfast” from a website called “finallyfast.com” .
So as usual I do my research before I download anything. then after I download the program i will scan it with as many different virus scanners as I can find.

On first analysis, I find that finally fast is actually hosted on a site “ascentive.com”. That site and it’s files have been noted as being malware with recurring charges to your credit card, that are really hard to get out of.
Site adviser website has noted that the content from ascentive.com is not safe . Siteadviser.

Ok so I went to the website anyway and started reading. They say it’s free from the get go. so I downloaded the file.

REALLY If you want to do a check up of your pc. I advise pcpitstop.com the only thing you need from there is an active x file and I find that activex file very safe.

but anyway I got the file and imediatly headed to Virscan.org and did a quick scan for any kind of computer cooties. This program is supposed to speed up your computer. Let’s just see. Well it turns out that all online scanners for single files, have a 10mb limit. This file from finallyfast.com or let’s say ascentive.com was 10.2 mb. Looks like they are a tad to large . So I compressed the file in a rar and proceeded to scan :-) .
one virus scanner found “Net-Worm.Win32.Bobic.k” could be a false positive but I found that other people found the same thing after the install. here are the results for finallyfast+worm and here are the results of finallyfast+trojan

Here is a forum that talks about the software and solutions.

The phone calls to suport
1st call
2nd call
3rd call
4th call is to ascentive, the mother company.
( They mention spyware striker)
pc speedscan pro I do not recommend installing this!!!!
activespeed Credit card issues.
Scan and sweep useless on xp, bad for vista.

If you have ever  clicked in to see a website and noticed that by you launch/start button you notice your browser says that you are waiting for  some program to start up from google. If you have ever said ” Hmmm should I be scared?”

If you are looking for a simple answer,

It’s a program you link with code on your website. The code in your  website sends information to google. Th information gathered is really thorough.  Types of data gathered are about the people surfing your website, such as point of origin, screen resolution, operating system, Exact search query, time on site, exit location.

For me some of this information is pretty useful. It tells me what size pictures I can put on my site to please the common public, what browser and operating system is my target to please. What content people where looking for and if I have exactly what they want or should I cover that content also or should I give a link to someone who does.

Google’s Version of the story

Not to be super conspiracy filled, but.

Um, that’s to much info about me. I am not comfortable with that much data. I really wouldn’t want the guy’s on the adopt a pet, website seeing that I whent straight to their site from an athlete’s foot site, and when I left I whent to a site about people who liked to eat with their feet.

Why is it that the google urchin gathers personal info about  us, kinda adware info. I mean really isn’t it for advertisement purposes….. why doesn’t my spybot ,asquared and addaware find it?  it is a js file so it does have beef.

Other than the issue with my personal self not liking the monitoring, I love being able to  tweak my site with the info I gather.

After years of not touching Dr.Web, I could not remember, in full, why I did not like it. I could not remember why I did not trust it. It has been at least five years since I tried it and someone I see is trusted by quite a few people recommends it. I gave it a go. Well the first download is 14 MB. Quite tiny and happens in a blink — although the file downloaded was actually just a tool to download the actual program. After the download was complete and the install was nearly finished, it asked for a verification key (I did not have one). So the program allowed me to press a button and have a key automatically inserted. Why? Dunno. The scan seemed pretty smooth; I didn’t see the scanner get hung up on anything. The list of files being scanned was pretty steady. Boots and reboots of the system were smooth and there was no delay or hang time from Dr.Web.

I consider any program that you have to find a program from a second party to remove to be malware. If the program does not allow me to see the size of the actual install until after it is finished installing (I had to navigate to the folder it was contained in), I consider it to be deceptive.

Granted, this is a workplace computer. I am not the first employee to use this computer and formatting it is not an option. I did find traces of Limewire once installed on this machine, so you should have a pretty good idea how beat down this machine is because of misuse. Since this program found nothing and ran smoothly, I decided to break out some of the tried and true programs: Ad-Aware, Spybot, and A-Squared. All three found something, and no, it was not all cookies. Ad-Aware found what it labeled as a w32.novarg.a@mm (aka MY DOOM) file. A-Squared found a few hijackers, and Spybot found, like, 60 things.

Now here comes the issue. I decided I do not need this program to start when I start my computer. Since it never found anything, I was not impressed enough that I could leave it on the workplace computer throughout the trial period. I went to un-install Dr.Web, but it wasn’t happening. The un-install actually tries to install the program again. I went through the whole step of seeing if it would say “before we can install you must un-install; would you like to un-install?” Never happened. Full install right over the current.

So I did a Google search on it. The best information I found was sad and scary, all in one. Delete all registry entries and then go back to the directory of install and delete all signs of Dr.Web. I really do not suggest you do that. I mean, it did not damage this machine. I booted fine afterwards with no errors, but if you are new to ‘regedit,’ stay out. It is much safer that way.

After 14 years of doing this online and nine years on local networks (before the Internet), you would think I learned my lesson. Well, I have learned that sometimes you just have to try stuff and be prepared to put things back together. Good thing I do and can.

Here’s an alternative.

TruXter

Owner and writer of :

iworkwithtech.com  and iworkwithpeople.com 

Let’s look at a free online virus scanner compared to Norton antivirus

I scanned with Norton first and found nothing, then scanned again with bit defender online free virus scanner.

what do you think is the better choice?

[tags] norton,macafee,avast,avg,protection,virus scan,trojan,worm,hack,security,spyware,adware,file protection,service[/tags]

See like a year ago I wrote a short story about what I think a hacker is, and how to protect yourself from them/one.

Well today I went back and read my story again. God the typos. Wtf was up with my firefox spell check that day ? Well while reading it I scrolled down and started reading what everyone else said…. These freaking people are saying stuff like “crackers aka black hat hackers” … Ok just thinking that line makes my nose bleed.

For the record, a cracker is a dude that cracks programs to circumvent copyright… don’t believe me? go to google and type this in “Torrent: Microsoft+Crack” and you will find some sort of executable file that allows you to use some sort of microslob product without authentication and or verification of purchase. In those results, take the time and count how many links you find with that result that are legit to what you searched… no go back to google and search “crack+network” you will not find squat. why? not because it’s uber top secret, it’s just misguided kids using a phrase improperly.

Now on to defense, set your router to stun, set email to text only, use mvps hosts file, run spybot search and destroy and the other two like. do not give your password to third party. update any virus scanner you have. If you don’t have one, well really it’s useless any, most virus writers attack the virus scanner right off these days anyway. That is why I use online scanners! Sounds cheap, only to the unwise.

Stay away from dirty sites, do not download from places you do not know, if you do for god knows what reason have to download from a strange place, google “jotti’s virus scan” and scan that single file with 20+ virus scanners at one time… Save yourself some heart ache.

I do not use avg or avast or nod32 because avg sucks from the get go, avast is nice and well enough but after a month it bloats your machine into oblivion. Nod32, if some newb tells you to use that junk it’s because he heard some dude on his favorite podcast recommend it, unknowing that the podcaster just got paid for that plug. again, when you go to jotti’s site, scroll to the bottom and look at the current virus finds, sit there and hit refresh for as long as it takes you to be satisfied with what you see, nod32 almost never finds anything.

People lay to much faith in software. If it’s your stupid mistake, it’s yours … own it.

Probably not the most techy news I have done here but I got a new job working for a company called “HiTech” Fire detection.

A fire alarm and sprinkler company from out in Houston area. The guys here are great and very relaxed. Kinda strange to me because I have never been this comfortable in a work environment.

Well forget all the intros let’s get to the bone. I seem to have been assigned a task of building a website. See this guy Eein that I am working with built a site straight from css and tables and stuff which of course i think is fine and runs circles around the current site . But the owner saw me messing around with some flash ap and just jacking around with my desktop and a web template . Now see, I didn’t really want the task of building the site, simply because if it looks lame to me I will rebuild it , and rebuild it and it will never be finished. I have scrapped it like five times now already.

Well if a site is what they want then a site is what they get. You see though, I like the site that Eein built. It just looks better and is more sound and can be easily updated when needed, and it can be crawled at any time by any search bot. The owners of the site want a flash intro and a flash ap on the page , a flash ap that I really do not want to get buried in. They want a room to navigate in with a fire extinguisher and a sprinkler and a horn strobe and a lighted exit sign above the door in the back. I am sure I can do it, but man I would hate to have to edit it. I can edit it but dang .

You guys tell me what looks better. I really like Eein’s site I have said that from the start and am really against a bloated flash site. The current site is done in mostly Iframes and I really cannot see a bot crawling that which really is not a helpfull thing, ya know? See I know that they are going to be expanding to Austin Dallas and San Antonio real soon, like before the end of 2008. They surely will be wanting an update to the site telling people in those areas that it would not take long for us to get our guys on the site. Now that is becoming bigger work. I am still learning the ropes of the job and if I spend all my time on the clock building a site, when my evaluation period ends and I don’t know anything……. dude I will be screwed.

Looking at hours of photoshop and adobe flash cs3 man,!!!!

The dell machine and adobe flash cs3 and if you could zoom way in, you would see photoshop somewhere in the taskbar. This sad little machine is a trooper though, it is doing all that with only 512 mb ram, minimum for flash install. The 3.2g pentium is the life saver there though.

looks like houston.com has them in the forefront