Monday, January 19, 2009

Daily Thoughts


This is a short interview of Kevin Mitnick who was immortalized in the book by Bruce Sterling called The Hacker Crackdown.

Daily Thoughts

Right now, I am scanning my computer for viruses with Computer Associates anti-virus as well as using Spy Bot Search and Destroy to scan for trojans and malware. I have previously had denial of service attacks on this blog because people don't like what I am saying. I have also had a few attempts to hijack this blog. It was not a fun experience. Right now, I am having problems logging into a few sites.

Sometimes people claim my blog is spam because they do not like the content and I have to contact the place where people claim it was spam to get it back up. This has happened a couple of times. Remember, if you state anything objectionable, it can be considered spam. Be careful where and how you post.

I have learned to leave spam alone unless it has specific offensive content. Some people are not even aware they are spamming. Most of it is innocuous; come visit my site, I like your site; join my directory, I think you will like it. There is a very fine line between spam and regular advertising. Some people are a little too thin skinned about their political or social views and have a hard time accepting there are other viewpoints. A good argument can be fun.

I have located a few files which puzzled me and deleted them, they are Java Shinwow.BH, a nice little piece of work. All of my caches on my machine are cleaned out. I am still having problem with one site, but I now can log into Blogcatalog. My Java is now updated, I still have not updated Microsoft...

My machine is now thoroughly cleaned.

Independent Retailers Outperform Chains This Holiday Season, National Survey Finds
http://news.bookweb.org/6539.html . For me this is encouraging. I believe a move back towards more independent small businesses and more locally produced products will make the United States stronger.

I put a new book on hold, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death: A Novel (Hardcover)by Charlie Huston (Author). It is reviewed on Amazon by Stephen King which is a bit surprising. I rather like Charlie Huston's Jo Pitt vampire detective novels. This looks like it may surpass them in bloodiness. It is about a company that cleans up after dead bodies.

5 comments:

Francis Scudellari said...

Good arguments are not only fun, but they can be instructive. If your viewpoint can't hold up under closer scrutiny, it usually means you need to rethink your position a little.

I had my web site hacked a couple months back, but that was just by someone trying to demonstrate their password-cracking prowess. A directed attack against a site for its content is much scarier.

Book Calendar said...

I found a few files that should not be there, trojans mostly, also some malicious spyware designed to redirect my site to places where hackers hang out. I am not sure why.

Alexandre Kovacs said...

Congratulations from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Very nice literary site which I will follow if you don´t mind.

NathanKP said...

I haven't had any spam of denial of service attacks against my blog yet. Someone would have a hard time doing a denial of service against a google blog hosted on Blogspot. Google has an awful lot of bandwidth and has security measures to automatically cut out hackers.

Book Calendar said...

Blogspot has very good security, but the secret of security is if it is on a computer and you want a 100% safety, you put in the basement in a corner not attached to the internet. Any communication over a computer is in some way open to fiddling.