Editor's Note — By Antone Gonsalves:
Claria Says Goodbye To Adware
There's a bit of good news in the fight against adware. Claria, once the
king of the market, is pulling out, leaving behind a business that less
than a year ago took in $300 million annually.
For anti-spyware advocates, this has to be a milestone. Claria, which was
known as Gator, made a bundle from its CoolWebSearch line that one critic
dubbed "the Ebola of the Internet."
To read more http://internetweek.cmp.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=183702012
Two men, Pat and Mike, are sitting next to each other at a bar. After a while, Pat looks at Mike and says, "I can't help but think, from listening to you, that you're from Ireland"
Mike responds proudly, "Yes, that I am!"
Pat says, "So am I! And where about from Ireland might you be?"
Mike answers, "I'm from Dublin, I am."
Pat responds, "Sure and begora, and so am I! And what street did you live on in Dublin?"
Mike says, "A lovely little area it was, I lived on McCleary Street in the old central part of town."
Pat says,"Faith and it's a small world, so did I! So did I!! And to what school would you have been going?"
Mike answers, "Well now, I went to St. Mary's of course."
Pat gets really excited and says, "And so did I! Tell me, what year did you graduate?"
Mike answers, "Well, now, let's see, I graduated in 1964."
Pat exclaims "The good Lord must be smiling down upon us! I can hardly believe our good luck at winding up in the same bar tonight. Can you believe it?!! I graduated from St. Mary's in 1964 my own self."
About this time, Vicky walks into the bar, sits down, and orders a beer.
Brian, the bartender, walks over to Vicky, shaking his head & mutters, "It's going to be a long night tonight."
Vicky asks, "Why do you say that, Brian?"
"The Murphy twins are drunk again."
Most of you have heard from Betty so we thought we would FYI. Some times it is the simple things or not.....LOL
Thanks to Len for his very hard work. There were times he and I both were ready to throw this computer in the dump or out a window maybe a hammer would have worked.
GX280
This machine suffered from a problem which affects a number of GX280’s. The cooling fan for the processor would run out of control due to a malfunction of the temp.regulating circuit. Once started, the only way to stop the fan was to restart the machine.
This machine first came to my attention because it was making a “frying eggs” sound. Once it came to the shop we found that the processor cooling fan would run out of control. On the original board, the problem was decidedly intermittent. The machine sat running on the bench for a couple of days before the problem expressed itself. Once symptoms were confirmed, I described the problem to Dell tech support. They explained that they had a bad run of heat sink/fan assembly. They sent a new heat sink assbly which I installed and ran for at least 8 hours. As the problem appeared to be solved, I had the machine sent back to the user. When the problem cropped up again, we had the machine sent back to the shop and a replacement sent to Betty from the hot swap pool. This time the problem occurred after a couple of hours on the bench. A call was made to Dell, where the “medical history” of the machine was discussed. This time they admitted to a bad thermistor on the MoBo and ordered a new board to be sent. After installing board #2, the fan went out of control after about 5 minutes of running! As a side note, the paperwork which is normally packed with any exchange product, was made out to an insurance company in Indiana. I wonder if we were sent an unreconditioned board.
Rather than calling Dell, I used the online system to replace board #2. Board #3 arrived (with correct paperwork) and was installed. This time the machine ran fine for a half hour or so before exhibiting the same symptoms. Normally the cooling fan will peak out at 3000rpm, a speed which is not particularly objectionable. I came up with this number by way of Dell diagnostics. Fan rpm is one of the parameters which are measured in the course of a complete diagnostic check. The low speed test is 1000rpm and the high speed test is 3000rpm. All of the boards tested ok under conditions set by the diagnostic program. When all of the boards went into their real world failure, I would estimate the fan was running 4-5 thousand rpm. One could feel the air blast eight feet away.
To replace board #3, I called Dell tech support. The tech rep decided to go all the way. He authorized a new system board plus a new processor and memory. If this failed we would go to a whole unit replacement. The replacement items arrived and were installed the next day. The cooling circuitry was fine but the fun wasn’t over. For reasons unknown, the operating system on the drive was trashed. All attempts to ghost a new image failed. Tried a couple of different new drives but all I got was a “Ghosterr” message after writing about 500megs. I finally resorted to a disk to disk ghost copy from a known good drive. You would think we were done with this dog, but you would be wrong. Part way through a Microsoft update, we got a blue screen with an error message which looked like it could be memory. Replacing the 1gb DIMMS with the 512mb on hand seemed to solve the problem. Two days later we received and installed brand new DIMMS, which brought the machine up to its original 1gb. The diagnostics indicated that one of the two 512mb DIMMS supplied by Dell were bad. The pair which I provided passed all diagnostics. Finally we may have a machine in good working order.
This is the most unusual machine I have ever seen. Normally Dell provides good replacement parts to cover the typical failures we see here. My suspicion is that either someone mixed bad parts with new parts, or someone was in a hurry at the repair center and failed to test properly. Needless to say, we spent a lot of shop time on this thing. Most of the time would have been spent with the machine in diagnostics, or with the machine running till it fails. I could have spent a much as eight hours changing components or setting up tests. Generally I’ll have a number of machines on the bench at some stage of diagnostics or running to failure. While one machine is running, I might be setting up another. If any other details would help, please let me know. Total time spent on this machine is really unknown. However, Len did spend more time than I.
Thanks,
Len and Ed
There is no hope for us, we are all drones. Almost every virus that we see today comes with trojans, polymorphic code, or rootkits. The spyware and viruses are all melded and there are a lot of mean people trying to steal my cookies. The good news though is that because we are all drones, thoses of us on the bottom of the food chain are fairly safe because we have nothing worth stealing. For years we counted on secruity through obscurity, but now we can depend on security through poverty. If you take over my computer you will find yourself standing in the middle of an empty room.
For this reason I am moving to linux, if I am going to live in an empty room myself it might as well be a different color.
I am currently at a hacker training run by SANS, and luckly for you, I will pose absolutly no threat to anyone once I complete the course (unless of course I am trying to fix their computer). The reason for this does not have anything to do with the course. It is an outstanding course (actually the best training I have ever been to. Honest!). The problem seems to be that I don't know anything about tcp/ip headers, operating systems or anything really. Mostly though, my problem is I don't know why dot (.) is in my path, apparently it is not in linux, which is good, but is in windows, which is bad. Because of this I had to take the two hour linux remediation course. This part of the course was great too, but I was reminded why I never did much programing in my earlier life (none actually). Command lines are great for those who can operate a keyboard, but anyone who has read my entries in this blog knows I can't tyoe. It is not so much the dyslexia, but the inability to hit the right keys.
So I can use the dopey tools that come with GUI's, but the cool stuff is done by command line in linux, and genrally it is done by people who do not have to type every command line three times. The good news trhough, is that I understand most of the concepts, so I'll be able supervise others who do what I can't do myself (or actually to undo what I can't do myself). Since this is what I do normally nothing will change.
If you ever have an opportunitry to attend a SANS training I highly recommend it, anbnd I am not just saying that because they own my computer right now.