Here is another reason why those of you running Windows should not use Internet Explorer.
Forbes reports Spyware problems are increasing, and a lot of these tend to arrive via Internet Explorer on unpatched Windows systems.

The people who call Dell Inc.’s customer service line often have no idea why their computers are running so slow. The ones who call America Online Inc. can’t necessarily explain why Internet connections keep dropping. And those who file error reports with Microsoft Corp. don’t always know why their computers inexplicably crash.

Sometimes, the company that gets the complaint is rightly to blame. But with alarming frequency, officials at these and other technology companies say they are tracing customer problems back to one culprit: spyware.

Of course, I’m not saying this is the only way for spyware to arrive, those folks who have installed some legitimate software have unknowingly installed Spyware as part of it. TechNewsWorld reports:

One major legal point so far gives spyware companies the upper hand. Many of the companies distributing spyware products have lengthy end-user license agreements. These are legal contracts. Some of these user agreements exceed 20 pages and contain hyperlinked references to additional terms and conditions.

For example, said English, buried in the middle of the document in fine print, the license agreement could state, “and, furthermore we can do whatever we please to your computer.”

Here are my helpful hints:

• Use Firefox as your web browser (as recommended by USA Today and Forbes.
• Enable Windows “Auto Update” to keep on top of securty fixes.
• Use something like AdAware to find Spyware and remove it.
  

There’s an interesting thread on AberMUD 1 going on over on Alec Muffetts blog where I wrote the following:

It was created as an extension of the Honeyboard BBS talker that itself was the result of a challenge from the Computer Unit sysman Rob Ash (immortalised as Rotash Burt the mobile in AberMUD1) that you couldn’t do it because there was no IPC.
So folks (I think Alan, Leon, possibly Jim, not sure as I hadn’t discovered them then) decided to create an IPC mechanism out of shared files.

And thus a legend was born, and a number of degrees ruined.

You could argue that without AberMUD 1 Linux would be in quite a different state these days.. 🙂

Alec has an article about his first experience of AberMUD when it was still part of the talker of HoneyBoard on the Honeywell L66 at Aberystwyth.

For those who’ve seen early AberMUD sources the reasons that rooms had numbers was because they started off as talker channels which you could go to for a chat with someone away from the hoi polloi of channel 0. 🙂

From a personal point of view without that experience in using and programming on a big multiuser system, and the people I got to know both inside and outside of the Computer Unit, I would not be where I am now, having fun with big Linux clusters!