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Back to the Forum Archives About one year ago, I had an internet worm attack that shut my computer down for several days. Fortunately, I had provided for such an emergency by having a backup computer. That saved my buns. I wrote about this in a Forum essay entitled Computer Viruses. It is in the Forum archive if you want to review it. The final outcome was I installed Norton SystemWorks 2003 on my computer. That first Norton package came with a one year update subscription. I had that set up to update the virus definitions automatically whenever I logged on. It worked fine. I always had the latest and best protection against the slime balls of the internet. However, it was a one year subscription and it was about to run out. They told me so in an e-mail. When I went to their site to renew, I discovered they have a new package that includes protection against spyware. I was happy to see that and I immediately ordered the new package. It only cost 70 bucks plus shipping and it turns out I will get 30 of that back. They have an upgrade rebate program in force. Great! Here is a sentence from the Norton manual: Just to clear the air about spyware, it's a different way for the swine of the internet to operate. Many folks may not immediately realize that the internet is a two way highway. When you are logged on to the internet your computer is an open door for the evil people. You don't have to give them permission. Unless you have some kind of shield up they can come right through that door and put stuff on your hard drive. What spyware does, once they sneak it in, is keep track of what you are doing and transmit the information back to the scum. They can get things like your user ID and password to your bank account. Wouldn't that be swell? In short, If you let them, they can steal your identity. I personally think that should be an executable offense, but it is not yet. Usually, even when they are caught, they just get a slap on the wrist. So. if you want to be protected, you have to do it yourself. That is where Norton comes in. They give me the tools to protect myself. The software from Norton arrived three days ago and installed it. Installation was not hard, but it was silly because of Norton's paranoia about software piracy. They are just a little bit less crazy than Microsoft. All it does to me is cause unnecessary keystrokes. Anyway, I got it installed and registered. Next, I ran a complete system scan and the program found no spyware or viruses of any kind. This did not surprise me since I have had Norton 2003 for about a year. Also, I am not as vulnerable to intrusions as some folks with cable are. That is because they are connected and vulnerable all the time. I am only vulnerable when I am logged on. Also they have a fixed IP address. I have a different one every time I log on. The IP address is a huge 12 digit number that is the real address of your computer on the internet. The screen name we use is really just a convenience for us mortals. We would have a problem remembering a 12 digit number every time we did something on the net. Instead of that, our providers map our screen name to the address for us. The way it works for dial up, like I have, is I get a new IP address from a common pool when I log on. When I log off the address is returned to the pool and can be reused. That means no marauder out there can lock onto my computer for all time. As soon as I log off, I disappear. In other words, the address is assigned dynamically. That is not true for cable users. When they sign up, with Comcast for example, their computer got assigned a permanent IP address. It belongs to that computer and only that computer. Since it is always on, it is more vulnerable to the marauders out there. In addition, once they have a fix on the computer they will always have it. As I said, it's like having an open door into your computer. As soon as you turn it on they can get in. Think of it this way. Imagine that there was a secret tunnel from your basement that had its other end somewhere in a big city ghetto. You would want to have guards in your basement at all times. That's what Norton is. It's a guard at the portal. Now that they have spyware protection it's a pretty burley guard. As I said spyware can be pretty nasty stuff because it can record and transmit anything you do on your computer. That should be scary enough to make you get Norton or some other shield up an running as soon as you can. Now, I ran Norton as soon as I installed it. A full system scan took 12 hours on my machine, but I have over 2 and a half million files. It would probably not take so long on most machines. Even so, I would suggest you run it at night while you are sleeping. It's worth the cost and the time it takes to run it. Norton can also be set up to rum automatically, so it is not necessary to do a full system scan often. It can be done when you suspect something is going wrong or on a regular schedule. like once a week. Now, for the techno-freaks the IP address is not really a
regular 12 digit number. It is really a 32 bit binary word. That
is four 8 bit bytes. Each byte can have a value of from 0 to
255. To make it readable by mortals it is represented as four
numbers separated by dots, like this 240.0.17.35. Notice that
leading zeros are implied and need not be listed. For example
the 35 in our address is really 035. For your test, figure out
what that would be in binary.
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