I really don’t know how a SMALL operation can do any kind of software scanning with all the…. legal challenges to have to answer to. Of course, I suppose some don’t, they just cave and their scanners suffer in effectiveness. Anyway, Sunbelt Software blogs about ANOTHER cease and desist letter they’ve received from the makers of CasinoontheNet, Cassava. I still think there should be class action suits against spyware/malware/difficult to remove-ware/makers that use deceptive practices to get their software installed/make it a nightmare for an end-user to remove and generally wind up COSTING end-users money having their pc’s cleaned.
Tag: remove
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Mandriva 2006 slow KDE performance
Somewhere along the line, there was a review up of Mandriva 2006 where the reviewer mentioned extremely slow performance in KDE, but on loading GNome instead, things were just fine. I’ve seen some slow KDE performance on the laptop that I upgraded and thought I’d pass along some of what I’ve done to help the situation. For starters, it’s probably a good time to review the main system services (yes I know it seems to be just KDE, but it never hurts to ask “do I really need to leave the webserver running all the time?”)
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Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part II
Well the saga continues. I suspect there will be a three as I get all software installed and mention tips and tweaks. III may not be named as such, I may just do a series of articles on little things that I’ve changed. At this hour I’ve got the KDE desktop for Mandriva 2006 up and running and am as I type letting more software install. I’ve had a few bumps along the way and let me tell you about them. First was the bad md5sum on the first disk image… my fault. I expected bittorrent to have checked it and made sure it was correct, but apparently that failed. Again, my fault.
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Sony’s OTHER DRM software uninstaller will be pulled
According to zdnet.com, Sony and SunnComm are pulling the OTHER DRM uninstaller from the web and it will be replaced with a safer version of the uninstaller. Researchers blogging at freedom-to-tinker.com had detailed serious vulnerabilities in the uninstaller for the DRM software made by SunnComm (called MediaMax). The companies say an effort will be made to contact the 223 users who had downloaded the uninstaller for the MediaMax software.
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Apache2 ( apache webserver ) not restarting
This is an error I’ve run into a few times. It’s rare enough that the second time I saw it, I had a vague memory that it had happened before. The third time though (was within the last week) I remembered and even remembered where the file was located to solve it. Here’s the problem….
As far as I know this is an apache2 problem, not prior.
Apache is not running. You try to start apache and receive the message…Cannot allocate shared memory: (17)File exists apache
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The best way to get rid of the Sony DRM rootkit
The SecurityFix has a great how to article for the general public on the best way to remove the Sony DRM rootkit that’s been big news the last two weeks in tech circles. First, DON’T use Sony’s removal software as that introduces more security problems. Hopefully Sony will get together a removal for THAT eventually. Right now though, Microsoft has updated it’s malicious software removal tool to remove the Sony rootkit. This link is to Windows Live Safety Center, which will give a page with, among other things, a button that says “Full Service Scan” in the lower right hand corner.
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Getting rid of an old PC – wipe the hard drive!!
I’ve said it before and mentioned DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) as my favorite tool for this, but Sunbeltblog is mentioning this and it’s worth reminding you. When you replace a PC, you might keep the hard drive around for a short period to make sure you have all your data, but PLEASE plan on finding some way to delete or wipe or nuke or destroy ALL the data on the drive.
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Get paid for the mistakes you make….
It seems that some companies are fortunate enough to be able to make money even from their faults. The Monterey Herald details an account of a woman who was informed by Choicepoint that crooks had accessed some of her personal information. This was apparently due to a lapse in security at Choicepoint. They then offered to sell her access to her own information to see what might have been compromised.
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Nasty regedit bug
This is unusual, but it sounds like there is a bug in regedit (and regedit32) which prevents the displaying of unusually long registry keys. Now, that sounds innocent enough, it also prevents the viewing of keys entered under them. Again, ok not a crisis. Imagine if you had an extremely long registry key entered in the ….software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/run area? Annoying maybe? Ok, what if it were put there by malware? Oooooooh… that would be bad….