by clearmind | Dec 3, 2007 | Uncategorized
Thought I’d give a shout-out to the makers of LogMeIn (http://logmein.com), who have come up with a useful free version of a product which turns out to be more handy than my previous option (a combination of DynDNS, VNC, and fiddling with routers). In the span of 3 months, I went from not using it at all to having more than a dozen systems on it. (It even has a Mac version, in beta, which I can use to remote-control my media-laden MacMini.) About two years ago, I tried to get Hamachi working — that was the original project by this company, so far as I know. Frankly I was left a little baffled, and ended up using the old standby, OpenVPN. However, compared to Hamachi-of-two-years-ago, LogMeIn is wonderfully slick. I foresee a time when I’ll be using its Rescue, Pro, and Backup versions — there are situations appropriate for those kinds. (Pro allows you to locally print off a remote program; Rescue lets you help people remotely without an install; Backup does what backup implies — competitor to Mozy?) But for now, LogMeIn is good enough to keep me from exploring further VNC, PCAnywhere, Connect, Remote Desktop, SharedView, WebEx, or Glance. In the future, those will surely become part of the...
by clearmind | Nov 19, 2007 | Uncategorized
A client of mine ran into an odd event last week: the computer seemed to be infected either with a virus or with an anti-virus program which wouldn’t shut up. After looking at it a bit, I had to shut down the web browser, and though I couldn’t find any malware, I made sure her workspace was over at a non-admin account. Now today, I find that reputable websites (that is, if mlb.com and canada.com are reputable) are serving advertisements from doubleclick — and those ads are the culprit. This youtube video shows what happens. What can you do? Well, we are now in the age of cross-site web programming, wherein almost all websites are assembled together on the web browser to create one’s internet experience. You have to assume that even responsible websites will be using scripts, videos, or widgets from other sites. And you also have to assume that they won’t catch everything. So: you have to practice safe browsing, now more than ever. This means one thing, above all: Don’t browse the web when you’re using your computer in a profile or account which can make widespread changes on your machine. (These are usually called “administrative” accounts.) If you do, well, you’ll be paying someone to clean up your machine sometime...
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