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

It's not an issue I have to deal with; all my "normal" (i.e. non-premium) UK calls are free, as are most of my international calls. It's all part of my Broadband package.

Ahhh I have to pay BT £120+ to get a switch flicked to the on position before I could get virgin near that. Or maybe the sky's the limit with somebody else.

I'd hesitate to recommend TalkTalk - they have the worst customer service department I've ever encountered, and they lost my broadband connection for several months, but if you have a BT line and no special requirements (i.e. not ex-directory or anything remotely non-standard) then...

Their "Talk3 International" package costs £9.99 a month plus line rental (£10.50/mo.). For that you get all non-premium UK, US, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and a few random European countries' calls for free and an "Up to 8MB/s" broadband connection with a 40GB/mo. cap. I get over 6MB/s on my connection.

So, that's broadband and almost all your 'phone calls for £20.49 a month including line rental, VAT etc.

You still have to pay BT. I don't use a phone, my prepay mobile costs me £5 a month, and I'm looking to reduce that, not increase it.

If BT would reconnect free, then charged only £20 per month for everything, then I would be better off.

But they are misleading, they say it's so much saving but forget to mention until after getting your attention that this offer is for 3 months only.

Besides, I can still remember BT charging me for free calls, a 40p connection fee.

But anyway, I've been reading my 'Washington Post' where the reporter whose name I can never remember, changed URI's of well known web-sites, including government agencies to point to his blog, just to show how easy it is to do. Examples in his blog.

So one of my domains is on a 301 redirect, nope two of them are. He doesn't say how he did it, but how secure is a 301.

I mentioned something similar earlier with reference to Trojan Downloader JS.Agent.axm.

"You still have to pay BT"

No, you don't. That's why you pay TalkTalk the line rental.

I'll have a look at that then.

Check the various message boards and see what sort of speeds people are getting in *your* area before you sign anything. I get a good broadband service, which is why I put up with their CS department, but I've heard of people getting under 2MB/s on the "Up to 8MB/s" service. It depends where you are located.

I've had yet another java update, now up to 7. Well I found the old updates remaining on my system, 0.5Gb of them. Are they safe to uninstall?

Probably. I ZIPped all mine just in case, and it hasn't caused me any problems yet. But that was in Windows 2000.

I googled it, if you keep the latest it's ok to uninstall the rest.

So I did, there wasn't 0.5Gb but 0.25Gb for uninstall, but I only gained 80Mb afterwards.

Browser Type Number of requests
1. Firefox 1,212
2. Netscape (compatible) 913
3. MSIE 724
4. Safari 159
5. Opera 109
6. Google-Sitemaps 19
7. Googlebot-Image 15
8. W3C_Validator 9
9. panscient.com 4
10. Java 3
11. Mediapartners-Google 1

This is my sites stats for the last 14 days.

The firefox is me, MSIE probably is aswell, but still somebody must be looking at it.

The appearance of my pc has completely changed. The startup items have completely changed, I now have a webcam on at start with a pic of me on the screen, the theme has changed, programs have disapeared, others don't work.

AND IT's driving me mad. This is obviously a government job, who else has designed such a malicious trojan, never heard of computers playing jokes on their owners before, therefore the trojan is specifically aimed at me.

How many others get infected this often, when running commercial security eh. It does my head in.

Do you have a ?

When my machine is sabotaged I usually blame the .

This is more than just sabotage, two of my email accounts have been wiped, I don't like to wake up to see my ugly face on the pc, on a custom theme that I couldn't manage to do myself.

The startup items have changed, manage startup items has disapeared, but regcure has a facility to disable startup items, such as webcam.

How do I get to startup items.

Firefox wouldn't start. But seems to be ok now. My security logged an invader, but no name.

It's settings have had to be reset.

I got a lot of downloads yesterday, java7, OpenOffice which is a big thing I accepted with java7. Firefox3.01 which was installed without my knowledge. All the firefox plugins and more besides.

I've had to reset my mail, two accounts were wiped clean. Don't know if I missed anything but I have an automatic CC to one of my online accounts, google in fact.

I am now worn out, and will set security to scan deep to find a rootkit, which usually takes several hours.

I wonder how hard it is to work in computing, at university they had a DEC system which was always down, then a Honeywell wasn't much better. Seems that you spend all your time fixing things.Never get the time to do anything else.

What do you think of this report:


Browser Name Number of requests
1. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0 705
2. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 642
3. Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) 566
4. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible 373
5. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.21 151
6. Opera/9.50 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en-GB) 109
7. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0 69
8. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12 65
9. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15 49
10. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1 38
11. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6 34
12. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1 31
13. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0 27
14. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; da; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 Firefox/2.0.0.16 27
15. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; da; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15 26
16. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-ES; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0 21
17. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 Firefox/2.0.0.16 21
18. Google-Sitemaps/1.0 19
19. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022) 18
20. Googlebot-Image/1.0 18
21. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506) 18
22. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1a1pre) Gecko/2008071918 Minefield/3.1a1pre 18
23. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; pt-BR; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15 17
24. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Safari/525.20 17
25. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_4_11; en) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.22 17
26. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pt-BR; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052912 Firefox/3.0 17
27. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15 17
28. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_4; en-ca) AppleWebKit/527+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.20.1 17
29. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30) 11
30. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-AR; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0 11
31. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061004 Firefox/3.0 11
32. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1) 10
33. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1 10
34. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 10
35. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080208 Mandriva/2.0.0.13-1mdv2008.1 (2008.1) Firefox/2.0.0.13 10
36. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15 10
37. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 10
38. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; es; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080512 Camino/1.6.1 (MultiLang) (like Firefox/2.0.0.14) 10
39. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705) 10
40. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080512 Camino/1.6.1 (like Firefox/2.0.0.14) 10
[not listed: 14] 82

Numbers 1&2 are mine, I know my operating system, the rest I don't know.

What's that in number4

"What do you think of this report:"

Wordy.

No joke, number4 is odd. I didn't put the smiley in it.

It said "4. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; ) 373" but it didn't have the space between the semicolon and the parenthesis. That's a fairly well-known bug in the "auto-converter"; "...8)" used to convert to "..." until we complained that tables of numbers in parentheses were being screwed up.