Due to recent federal legislation, it is no longer necessary to pay to get a copy of your credit report. Almost any consumer may get a copy of their credit report for free, once each year, from each of the three credit reporting agencies. At present, this service is only available to residents of Western and Mid-west states. By September it will be available throughout the United States. Read the rest of this Post »

It is very important to protect your online accounts with strong and secure passwords. You probably have heard that before. But did you do it? Probably not.

“Yea, OK, OK, what is a strong password anyway?”

Well, it may be easier to answer that by first looking at what is a weak password. Read the rest of this Post »

If you sell anything over the Internet, please beware of a recent spat of very authentic looking fake money orders. These counterfeit USPS Money Orders appear to be VERY authentic. But it is very easy to spot a fake if you know what to look for. Read the rest of this Post »

Here is another example of a fake email that has recently circulated on the Internet. It purports to be form the FBI. It is not from the FBI. It has the following text: Read the rest of this Post »

Hey, this isn’t chocolate chip! This is more like PIE in you face. (We’ll explain that later.)

Really it is all our fault! At least according to a company named United Virtualities. You see, it turns out that far too many of us are deleting cookies from our computers. Yes, how dare us delete cookies that web sites install without permission. But hey, who’s computer and who’s privacy is is anyway? Read the rest of this Post »

The latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, Volume VII - March 2005 indicates that XP SP2 may have resulted in a dramatic reduction in the number of bot scanning incidents. Symantec reports that these incidents have dropped from 30,000 per day to only 5,000 per day. They attribute much of the decrease to improved security features in XP Service Pack 2.

So what’s in XP Service Pack 2 anyway? Here is a list of the fixes, patches, enhancements and updates provided by SP2.
SP2 List of Fixes

Hey! That’s a pretty long list!

We encourage all users to upgrade to SP2 if they have not done so already.

Actually, you don’t have much of a choice… Read the rest of this Post »

Numerous reports of computer rage have been surfacing all around the world. Evidently some otherwise sane and level-headed people have become so frustrated by malfunctioning, non-functioning, crashing, virus and malware infected computers that they are taking out their frustrations in all sorts of wild and crazy ways. Some of these reports can be found here: Read the rest of this Post »

This spoof is potentially quite dangerous. Conventional wisdom is that one of the best ways to spot a fake web site is to look for the s in https: and look for the lock symbol on the bottom bar of the window. This of course pertains to web sites that use SSL certificates like financial institutions and shopping sites. Read the rest of this Post »

Download.com recently published their latest test and rewiew of several major anti-spyware applications. The results can be found here: Spyware Obstacle Course II

Seems that Ad Aware came out on top in this test. Your milage may vary. Read the rest of this Post »

If you connect a computer to the Internet, even for a few seconds, Read the rest of this Post »