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Followup on safe shopping online at Christmas

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I can't stress enough how many systems I see on a weekly basis that are full of malware and viruses, causing costly removal sometimes involving fees that are often more than the cost of a replacement. Many times the true damage is identity theft which will not show up immediately and has very long-term effects. Usually the root cause of vulnerability is using a PC that is not fully up to date. You have to be diligent in updating all the software on your system especially with operating system patches, web browser patches, current anti-virus and anti-malware software.

If you use Windows I recommend surfing the web with Firefox with the NoScript plugin activated.

Having said all that, read this article for some tips on Safe Online Christmas shopping. The one thing I would add is many bank, and credit card companies offer (even PayPal) one time use credit card numbers which work great for online shopping.

Top Tech sites

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The TOP 50 Tech SitesAsking a bunch of system administrators where they go for their online technical advice and troubleshooting resulted in a wealth of sites that surprised me with its variety, depth, topics, and focus. Prepare yourself for some serious surfing! So here are, in alphabetical order, [drumroll] the TOP 50 TECH SITES ! http://www.activewin.com/awin/default.asp http://www.blackviper.com/ http://centralops.net/co/ http://www.dalantech.com/ubbthreads/index.php http://desktopengineer.com/ http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/networking/ http://www.eventid.net/parseevent.asp http://blogs.msdn.com/exchange http://www.governmentsecurity.org/ http://www.iana.org/ http://www.ittoolbox.com/ http://www.jsiinc.com/reghack.htm http://labmice.techtarget.com/ http://www.msexchange.org/ http://www.only4gurus.com/v2/index.asp http://www.practicallynetworked.com/ http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/ http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/ http://secunia.com/ http://slashdot.org/ http://www.slipstick.com/ http://sourceforge.net/ http://www.sunbelt-software.com/community.cfm http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/information.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/technet/ http://techrepublic.com.com/ http://TechTarget.com/ http://ThinkGeek.com/ http://TomsHardware.com/ http://kb.ultratech-llc.com/ http://www.w2knews.com/ http://www.snapfiles.com/ http://www.windowsitpro.com/ http://www.windowsitpro.com/windowsnt20002003faq/ http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/

Daylight Saving Time Change

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Daylight Saving Time change the affect on computers...The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandated a change in daylight saving time A major change, it will be extended by four additional weeks starting in This year. The change takes effect on March 11, DST will starts three weeks earlier than usual. If your computer is relatively new and automatically updated, you probably don't have anything to worry about. Older operating systems may require manual updates. Microsoft is making update tools available for Windows, Outlook, Exchange and mobile products. For more info on making the transition easier and links to utilities: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_overview MS KB article 914387 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387 For Unix systems just update /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/*