h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Chris and all the best for tomorrow.

No2 son was caught up in last year's fiasco, thank the godness he had decided not to go to uni.

The people I know who have gone to Southampton have really enjoyed, one stayed on to do his Masters and PhD in Computer Sciences.

We've had a warning from our isp about the virus, I'll remind A to deal with it when I get home. Good luck with the A Level results Chris I'm sure that they'll be sorted out this year, people are actually taking an interest in what exam boards do which is new. I'm convinced that only an 18 year old would be arrogant to think that they could deal with what goes on in medicine, and by the time you have to deal with it medical school changes you emtionally when dealing with things like this.

I'd like to see that virus try to shut down my desktop. I haven't been able to shutdown/restart my machine without doing a hard reset in several months. I hate watching scandisk. I guess it's time to upgrade from ME to XP. Mr. Moniker is planning on taking some vacation time to address the issue.

WM, I'm still using ME too. Everyone else in the house is using XP and says it is loads better.

But the whole thing needs reformatting and with dual boot up and the current problems, I'm kind of hoping that No2 son will build me a new machine once he has finished the one for his g/f's dad.

Skip XP and go straight to Linux or FreeBSD. I am now officially on an anti-microsoft crusade. This was the last straw. I'm not just a Mac enthusiast now, no, it's gone far beyond that.

If only there were good games for Linux.

What worries me about the virus is that I don't know how to install the patches. At work I have someone to do that. And we're really well protected there and probably won't get it anyway. But at home I just have Norton on my desktop. I do keep it updated. Will hope for the best.

*waves to Chris...good luck *

Part of the problem with the MSBLAST worm is that it can try and launch a denial of service attack (or similar) on the windows update website where you go to get the patches.

Hypatia, if you're running XP then it comes with the windows update tool which goes and checks what patches you've got and what you need and does it all automatically for you - asking which patches you want to download and then again before it installs them. Or you go to the windows update website and let it do the work for you from there. If you're running another version of the windows OS I don't know what you'd do.

d'E

And d'E it depends on what you class as good games. You can get some comercial games for Linux but I don't know what (I'm not a gamer).

I've a macintosh
Windows worms? I'm immune to
not that i gloat... much

Nice haiku, Sporky.

Are any of you familiar with the latest fad, flashmobbing?

http://www.wordspy.com/words/flashmob.asp

It has arrived in the UK:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3134559.stm

Thanks for the best wishes. We'll see what happens...

The irony of there not being any decent games on Linux is that all the good games are developed on that very OS. The companies just never release them on the platform afterwards. Though, actually, Unreal Tournament 2003 has a Linux version on the third CD.

The MSBlast worm is scheduled to attack the Windoze Update site on the 15th of this month, yes. It should have spread enough by then to become a right nuisance.

Although everyone should keep their copy of Windoze fully patched up, the one patch you need to protect yourself from being infected by MSBlast is the one on this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-026.asp
(If you don't know whether you want the 32-bit or 64-bit patch, you'll want the former. )

Chris, I must disagree regarding RPC. It is a *stupid* thing to leave turned on in general. All it really does is allow other devices to send commands to your machine. It is the cause of many exploits in the past, and will be the cause of more as time moves on. M$ have for too long allowed insecure products to make it to market, and it is getting out of hand. I am very near to killing my windows installation and making it a *nix box. This virus is very nearly the last straw.

Well, I don't really know anything about this RPC service anyway, so you may be right. I only suggested not disabling it based on my own observations. The people in the thread I linked to that did disable it had more trouble afterwards than those who merely told it to not restart the computer on termination (which is where the 60 second countdown message comes from).

[fg, in another smoky day]

[{Courtesy}]

[Ben]

[spk]

[BB]

Having problems getting in

Except via the back door

I think we should end the story right there.