Antivirus 2009 email going around

I thought it was an email hoax at first...you know, like the one about the 190 pound cougar that someone supposedly shot in Iowa...but I guess it's real.

Here's the email I received:

Another one, actually a malware, is called Anti-Virus 2009. It is a seriously obnoxious problem. You will go to a website that looks innocuous, and suddently this fake anti-virus program takes over your screen and you can't get rid of it. It tells you you have been attacked (which is true) and wants $39.95 or some such amount to get rid of it. This fake program looks exactly like Microsoft's anit-virus program and is a royal pain in the ass. Internet Explorer is made inoperable when it strikes. It was apparently created by some Russian creeps who now distribute it like some kind of franchise. It tried to mess with my Mac, too, but either couldn't get a grip or the program I have for malware, spyware, and other obnoxious stuff stopped it.

The only way I could get rid of it on my wife's pc was to downloadmbam-setup.exe from Malwarebytes.com onto my Mac, make a CD of it, install on her machine, and turn it loose. I have the program, and if you want it I'll send it along.

It sure reads like one of those hoax emails that goes around. Microsoft doesn't have an antivirus program, for one thing. Also, why is anyone still using Internet Explorer? Haven't we learned out security lessons about Microsoft software yet?

I always wonder how much Microsoft gets paid by the antivirus software companies to stay out of the market. I mean, the fact that windows is insecure is their fault. And, they are certainly happy to take over the business model of any other company that writes software.

Anyhow, a little digging revealed that it's a malware program that you get by going to a bad or compromised website.

Another method of distributing Antivirus 2009 involves tricking you by displaying deceptive pop-up ads that may appear as regular Windows notifications with links which look like buttons reading Yes and No. No matter which "button" that you click on, a download starts, installing Antivirus 2009 on your system. Antivirus 2009 installs on your computer through a trojan and may infect your system without your knowledge or consent.

So yeah. Hope the guys who wrote this get their karmic comeuppance.

The other thing that was a surprise to me in that email, was the fact that Malwarebytes is a real program, and that a lot of people recommend it. I hadn't heard of it yet, which is strange cause I get asked to help people with this sort of problem a lot and so I pretty much keep up with developments in the field. Not lately, I guess.

Just for fun, here are a couple of links that talk about removing this spyware.

Enigmasoftware Antivirus 2009 Removal Instructions

Removal instructions at BleepingComputer

Note that I am not recommending Enigmasoftware or Bleepingcomputer or their instructions as I have not had this problem and so don't have any personal experience getting rid of it (yet).

So, use Firefox and keep your shields up when you stray off the beaten path! (how's that for mixed metaphores?)

Left4Dead demo has a virus in it?

At least that's what Nod32 thought.

I installed the demo via Steam and after it finished (2GB download!), I tried to launch the game.

Steam told me, "This game is currently unavailable. Try again later."

Weird.

So I g-g-googled it, and the Steam knowledgebase told me to rename ClientRegistry.blob, to delete a bunch of files in the Steam folder, to verify the game cache...yada yada.

What the problem was, was that Nod32 quarantined the Left4Dead executable. I just happened to notice the quarantine take place when I tried reinstalling the game.

So, I set Nod32 to exclude the Left4Dead folder from scanning. Now it works.

Except for the stutter.

Also, Left4Dead is going to be a Really Fun Game.

:-)

Electromagnetic radiation is unlikely to cause cancer

I think this is interesting...

The proton precession magnetometer operates on the principal that the protons in all atoms are spinning on an axis aligned with the magnetic field. Ordinarily, protons tend to line up with the earth's magnetic field. When subjected to an artificially-induced magnetic field, the protons will align themselves with the new field. When this new field is interrupted, the protons return to their original alignment with the earth's magnetic field.

I didn't know that protons had any spin on them. Cool.

Here is some more info: about solar radiation.

"Insolation is a measure of solar radiation energy received on a given surface area in a given time."

"The radiant power is distributed across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, although most of the power is in the visible light portion of the spectrum. The Sun's rays are attenuated as they pass though the atmosphere, thus reducing the insolation at the Earth's surface to approximately 1000 watts per square meter for a surface perpendicular to the Sun's rays at sea level on a clear day."

I thought it was 100 watts, but it's 1000. That's the peak power. The average is 250 watts:

"The actual figure varies with the Sun angle at different times of year, according to the distance the sunlight travels through the air, and depending on the extent of atmospheric haze and cloud cover. Ignoring clouds, the average insolation for the Earth is approximately 250 watts per square meter (6 (kW·h/m²)/day), taking into account the lower radiation intensity in early morning and evening, and its near-absence at night."

Here is a chart of the wavelengths of solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere (yellow), and reaching the surface (red). Cell phone frequencies are on the infrared side of visible light...wayyy off the chart on the right.

(A nm is a nanometer, 1 billionth of a meter. Cell phone signals are at a wavelength of a foot, or 304,800,000 nm. Microwave ovens are at a wavelength of 112,400,000 nm or 4.8 inches.)

Now, as we go left on the chart, the emf's have more energy. X-rays are off the chart on the left. They are called ionizing radiation. They have so much energy they can break the bonds that hold molecules together, creating ions. They can break molecules in cells, in the DNA.

RF radiation does not have enough energy to break molecules.

X-rays have about 1,000 eV of energy, while the photon energy of radio waves from cellular phone towers is about one millionth of an eV, not enough to alter molecules in the body.

The difference in energy: 1000 vs 0.000,001

Looking at the chart, RF radiation is to the right of Infrared radiation, therefore, RF radiation has less energy than the infrared radiation from your oven, or fireplace. Even visible light has more energy than EMFs.

And, here is some info from Cancer.org

Moreover, public exposure near cell phone towers (Way more juice than your phone) is not significantly different than background levels of RF radiation in urban areas from other sources, such as radio and television broadcast stations.

What Does the Epidemiologic Evidence Say?

No human studies have focused specifically on cellular phone towers or even on radio waves more generally. Several studies have looked at the effects of radio waves and microwaves combined; these have generally not shown any increase in cancer, except for a US Air Force study that suggested an increase in brain tumors in association with radiofrequency/microwave exposure.

What Does the Animal Evidence Say?

A number of animal studies have been conducted, generally showing no carcinogenic (cancer-causing) effect of radio waves. Several experiments have used exposure levels that cause a rise in tissue temperature(!), and even in these studies, there was no increase in DNA mutations or in cancer. A recent review concluded that: "The scientific evidence indicates that exposure to radiofrequency radiation fields is not mutagenic and is therefore unlikely to act as an initiator of carcinogenesis.” (Emphasis, mine)

If you want to know about how microwave ovens work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven

Solar radiation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation

Cell phone radiation from Cancer.org

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_1_3X_Cellular_Phone_Towers.asp

with lots of references and citations

Off on a tangent...Again.

How to deal with Spam

If you Don't Already Get Spam
First and foremost, never put your email address anywhere out the internet where it will be visible on a page. If you do put it out there, you will get spam. Do not register a domain name without whois protection. If your registrar can't hide your email in the domain registration records, use a Gmail acct for your domain contact.(see below).

Next, Have two email addresses.

One gives you everything you really need to see, the other is for all the misc. stuff.

Your PRIVATE email is one that you only give out to real actual live people (and maybe your bank or another business with which you have a private and trusting relationship)

The other email is your PUBLIC email address, and I suggest a Gmail address for this, because Gmail has the greatest spam filters in the world. This address is used for newsletters, Amazon orders, and friends that like to send FW: RE: emails.

I collect email from these two addresses in two separate email programs (Outlook and Thunderbird). That way my private email account only gets mail from people I REALLY want to hear from. It cuts down on the distractions in a BIG way.

If you give your email address to someone who likes to send FW: RE: type emails, get them to change to start sending stuff to you at your public (Gmail) account, or sooner or later your PRIVATE email addr will end up on a computer that is virus infected and you will start to get spam. This has happened to me.

For an email address that gets spam, a couple ideas.
You can set up Gmail to receive your email, and then you can set up Gmail and your email program (Outlook, Thunderbird...) to get the email from Gmail. That way your email gets filtered by Gmail. Gmail's filters are so good that one of my clients had 2000+ spams filtered out, 2 that got through and no false positives.

Outlook has pretty good spam filters. Update Outlook at Office Update, and then set Outlook's junk mail options to High. What happens for me is that almost all the spam goes into the Junk folder, and I also get false positives on a regular (predictable) basis. The false positives are fairly easy to deal with. I only get them once, and I only get them from new correspondents. I keep and eye on the contents of my junk folder and 'mark as not junk' any emails coming from a real person. Now, I don't have a lot of new correspondents, and I don't get thousands of spams, so this works for me.

If you have your own domain and website, you can even change your MX records so that Google apps for domains collects your email, instead of your hosting company's email servers. Again, you get the benefit of Gmail's awesome spam filters. I set this up for a client and it's been awesomely successful. It's transparent for the client, he just collects his email in Outlook the same way he did previously.

Get an Antivirus program - You absolutely must have an antivirus program.
AVG Free Download
Comodo Antivirus free
NOD32 - Best paid antivirus

Horribly Wrong: Adwords keyword tool advertiser competition

Google's Adwords Keyword tool supposedly shows how much competition there is for a given keyword phrase, but sometimes when I perform a search on that keyword in Google, I see no ads whatsoever.

Here is an example:
According to Adwords there is a medium high degree of advertiser competition for the phrase "visa logo"

Click for larger image

Yet when I go to Google and do a search for "visa logo" I get zero ads.

Click for larger image

So, what is going on here?

When I am working with Adsense or Adwords I have started doing searched to verify that there are competing ads in Google. In Adsense, if you are trying to write content for a high competition ad, to get highly paid clicks, then you will want to know that there really are NO advertisers for that keyword.

In Adwords, no advertisers can mean a niche that none of your competitors have discovered, which is like finding money on the street.

Your thoughts?

Letter to send to friends who FWD emails

Hi xx,

Like 99.9% of these forwarded emails, this one is also not true.

[http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/missing/penny.asp]

Snopes is a really good place to check the truth of FW[re:] fw: RE: type emails. Or, you can safely ignore ALL these types of emails. In 14 years of internet usage I have only ever seen two that were true. (One was the "uses of bounce sheets" email, which had a few true items on it).

Pepsi and AOL are not going to give us $123 for each email we forward, Captain Kangaroo was not a war hero, nobody shot a 190# mountain lion in Iowa, the lawyer of that deposed Nigerian dictator will not share his former master's 30 mil with us if we help him with transferring some money(to give just a few examples I have seen).

Also, if you look at the top of the email, you will see a whole bunch of email addresses, of all the people it was sent to. These are all now ripe for the picking for any scam artists or spammers who will get this email down the road. And since this email has already been circulating since 2001, we can expect it to get a lot of mileage in the future.

I, for one, don't want my email address to travel along with it.

Feel free to send this back to the person who sent the [amber alert] to you, maybe it will help cut down on this kind of stupidity, and waste of time and network resources.

Funny, if you are a web developer, I guess

"our extensive research has shown that failure in relationships is directly proportional to the number of Alt codes one has memorized"

~Author Unknown

[How bad is it if I only know three? Well, maybe four.]

"I spent a minute looking at my own code by accident. I was thinking 'What the hell is this guy doing?'"

"I went on a 30-day diet, and lost 30 days"

"How can you think you matter when your URL has a tilde in it?"

"leave the advanced tab alone - if you were advanced you'd know how to use it"

"i should just make web sites, then i can make lots of money and not have to work too hard."

"this site best viewed if you come over to my office and look at it on my state-of-the-art graphics terminal"

"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you." -Rita Mae Brown

"Using Navigator? Or a modem? Are you in a school or a library? We don't want your business. Go hunt rats for food. Damn cavemen."

Strange characters ’ and  in Wordpress posts

After a wordpress upgrade we started to get all kinds of weird symbols in our posts, including  and ’. I figured it was a character encoding mismatch problem and a quick search on the Wordpress forums confirmed it. You have to comment out two lines in your wp-config.php file (found in your main blog directory). These are the two lines:
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Comment them out like this:

//define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
//define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Fixed our problem.

Changing the ordering of products in Zen Cart 1.3.7

Here's a simple one, but I didn't know how to do it right away. If you want to feature the products on your main Zen Cart page in a certain order, you can do that by going into the admin and editing the sort order number at the bottom of each individual product. Lower sort order numbers show up first on the catalog page.