Stuff to avoid on the internet

My PC was running a bit on the slow side last night. Pages were loading slowly and all the usual stuff. I thought at the time that it was just traffic with my ISP, but this morning I noticed an icon on my toolbar that I didn't recognize. Upon investigation, I realized that it was most dreadful of all programs "Limewire", the so called free file sharing software. Seems my son was up to mischief and downloaded it last night. I was not best pleased, particularly as I had already warned him about this program before.
After un-installing the program and running my registry cleaner on the PC, things were not better. I did a file search on the whole PC and found a dozen other Limewire related files and folders that I immediately deleted. Finally, things are now back to normal. The registry cleaner picked up more than 200 errors when I did the clean. I'll be having words with young Craig when he gets home from school. I've no doubt he will deny doing this.

Here's a few other bits of software to avoid.

"Bearshare" - I spent a day at a friends house cleaning their PC. It had picked up a nasty trojan that caused the PC to crash on startup.

Bespoke email software such as Outlook and its equivalents are OK I guess, but I don't use them, preferring to use webmail only. The downside with email software is that it automatically dowloads' all emails and attachments. BY using a webmail account, not only can I pick up email from any PC, I get th choose which emails I download to the PC. Some malicious programs attach themselves to emails and will execute the moment you look at the file, even without opening it.

There are likely many other bits of software that are a danger. The only file sharing program I used in the past is "Ares". This seemed to be quite stable and is also not free. I think the license was around 25$. It never seemed to cause much of a problem other than the fact my kids filled my whole hard drive with downloaded movies and music. Subsequently, I don't use it any more.

Well, I'm back to work tomorrow after a pretty relaxing week off. I spent most of it just slobbing around the house, although I did do a little autumn clearing up of the garden.

It's been interesting glancing back at some of my old blogs whilst backing them up on Multiply. Loads of the YouTube videos that I posted have subsequently been withdrawn. Like any sort of journal writing, it's been useful to read back "where I was" a year or so ago. Talk about a guy with mood swings! LOL

A few years ago, this video was being emailed all over the place. It's a classic.