GuruNews, Volume 9 Number 11, 3-19-09

Thu Mar 19 21:15:31 EDT 2009

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Vol. 9, No. 11                           

3-19-09

1 March Madness  

2 911?. Nope

3 IE8, Palm bleeds money, easy access iPhones, Facebookers will get over it

4 Another security tool              

5 Possible new threat armors up

6 Satellite access

March is here.  The first official day of spring is Friday, we've had a few gorgeous days and the bone chilling temperatures are (I hope) gone for the next several months.

But with the good comes the bad, especially IT managers.  Forget high pollen counts, think college basketball.  With Conference Tournaments wrapping up last week and three weeks of the NCAA Tournament starting Thursday IT types everywhere are scrambling to figure out how to either handle the bandwidth load or how to block sites entirely.

In the age of broadband, corporate Internet access and sites popping up like weeds carrying scores and streaming video it can make a technology officer cry.

Workers everywhere will be stampeding to the web to check their brackets, their standings against others in their pools and even watching games live on sites like http://mmod.ncaa.com/.

Every news site will carry current standings so even if the streaming is blocked you'll still be busy every couple of hours updating your scores.  No Internet at all at work?  No big deal, just have the scores beamed straight to your mobile phone.

Managers basically throw in the towel this time of year.  Even if the building is cut off from the outside world and wrapped in foil to block phone and radio signals the employees will still be buzzing around the water cooler.  For that matter, a majority of managers are caught up in the same buzz and dived into the office pool with both feet.

All in all it's a unique time of year and, despite the ribbing we get when our teams lose or don't even make the "big dance", I think almost everyone enjoys it.  Other than the poor IT guys and gals, of course.

I'm a little short on wordage this week.  I'm still working on my brackets ;)

Kevin Mefford

pcguru at microdome.net

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

Internet Explorer 8's speed will be better, its product manager said
today, for folks who live in the real world. Tell that to the planet
with the Firefox and Safari users:

http://tinyurl.com/cyhqcm

Palm continues to hope the Pre and webOS can help it get back to
profitability, as it reported a third-quarter loss of $98 million:

http://tinyurl.com/cr2uyz

AT&T has confirmed a report that it will offer iPhones without a
two-year contract starting next week:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10200602-37.html

There's a new Facebook app out there, designed to poll users on the
social network's latest redesign. The results? Hundreds of thousands
have responded. 94 percent give it a thumbs-down:

http://tinyurl.com/dgnj7c

Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus at gmail.com  
www.mattstodayinhistory.com

Download of the Week

While SuperAntiSpyware has an unfortunate name, it is a scan tool worthy of addition to your arsenal of spyware/malware protectors.  I've used this application for about six months and recommend it heartily.  It's speedy, too.  The most recent scan of my 1.08TB of storage was completed in 23 minutes. This useful program does a thorough job of scanning your system for dangers, and then whacks any it finds. SuperAntiSpyware scans not just your files and memory, but your Registry as well in search of potential dangers.  

It's free here:

http://www.superantispyware.com/superantispywarefreevspro.html 

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com  

Threat of the Week

The Conficker worm has been floating around for a while and continues to infect machines while causing little trouble.  That may be about to change.

The so far dormant infection fired up Monday and contacted a list of servers for "instructions" and received an update to its programming code.  This could indicate that someone somewhere is about to turn millions of infected PCs into a huge botnet for who knows what purpose.

I won't attempt to describe this thing in such a short space so you can read the gory details at:

http://tinyurl.com/cu545z

Your only defense at this point it to make sure your antivirus program is up to date and watch for unusual network activity.

Kevin Mefford

pcguru at microdome.net

Email Question of the Week

Q:  I have no service but dial up in the country but have been seeing
Hughes Net commercials. I have talked with several different people
who say they hate it but others who like it. Also I am getting a new
computer and am leaning toward a Dell or Apple---I think probably a
laptop instead of desktop. Have any suggestions?

A:  If satellite is your only option in your location then it is much
better than dialup. The limitation with satellite is you can only
download 100 to 150 Megs of files per day.

After you reach that point Hughes Net throttles your internet speed
down to 56.6 speed and will start ramping it back up after a few hours
to your regular speed. If you do not download a lot of large files
then you will never hit this threshold so if it is just for web browsing and online banking and such then you will enjoy it. 

I used to be a tech for Hughes and I had the service for a couple of years
before we finally got DSL where I live and it had decent speeds but it
is not as fast as cable or DSL, but is much faster than dialup. The
price is a bit restrictive, though; I was paying around 60 dollars a
month. You can also use this with a wireless router so if you get a
laptop you can browse the web from anywhere in your home. You might
want to confirm you can have a Mac with Hughes Net because there is
some software that goes on your computer or there used to be ---I have
been away from it for 5 yrs now.

Jamie Smoot

Smoot88 at bellsouth.net

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