Hacking and Credit Cards

There is only 1 printed magazine that I subscribe to anymore – that is Wired Magazine. For some reason, I just enjoy reading the articles and the layout. This month’s issue contained a very interesting article on a guy name Max Butler. To quickly summarize – when the Fed’s busted him, his laptop had over 1 million credit card numbers. …

WebspaceGeeks Revamped

It just seems like there is never enough time in the day to get everything done! As many of you are aware, I also have a domain/hosting company setup at www.webspacegeeks.com. Typically I use this site to register domains and setup hosting for my web development clients. Every now and then I get a “drop in” customer who finds me …

Classroom Computers

============= From Email to a client============= I’ve finally compiled my list of suggestions for helping to secure them and streamline the process of setup. This will help insure consistency of the laptops which will provide a much better classroom experience. Hopefully, the computers will be running XP, but these recommendations will work for Vista as well. Implementing all of this …

Open Source a Deal-Breaker to Large Companies – Right!

Recently, one of my clients was discussing a possible business deal with a relative – who happens to work for a Fortune 500 company in some capacity. Let’s call him “Bob.” The discussion turned at some point to open source software and Bob stated, “Major companies will not do business with anything open source.” Now, I may be off the …

Serious IE Vulnerability

I know – I know. Typically I don’t post about Internet Explorer exploits. However, this one is pretty serious. I do have a few customers that must use IE for sites such as the Caddo Parish and Bossier Parish websites. Both of them stupidly use Active X controls. Not that either of these sites are malicious, but they tacitly encourage …

Formatting or Wiping – Erasing – Drives

———————- From Email: going to be donating a couple of old computers to Goodwill. What is the best wayto wipe the hard drives? Is reformatting safe enough?———————- Simply deleting files in Windows (and most OS’es) doesn’t actually delete the data. It is fairly trivial to recover it. The only way to insure security is to “wipe” or “nuke” the data …

Reinstall Windows XP on a Laptop

Recently, I had a friend of an existing client call. His laptop had somehow corrupted (apparently) all of the drivers for XP. Unfortunately, time was short and I could not get it back to a working state, before he had to return to Arkansas. To further complicate matters, the corrupted drivers included basically all of the core hardware. He could …

Myspace and Antivirus 2009

When it rains it pours. This post follows-up to this one. Getting Rid of Antivirus 2009 – Antivirus 2008http://smartergeekcom.wpengine.com/blog/2008/12/antivirus-2009-is-actually-spyware-or.asp ——————From Email—————— im so aggravated at this thing all i do is check my yahoo mail and talk to my niece on yahoo messenger ———————- My Response———————- As I told you yesterday via email and on the phone, I will be …

I love my job – again

I say this over and over: I wake up every morning – not regretting needing to work – but wondering if there are enough hours in the day to do all the cool things I get to do. Today was no different. It was absolutely crazy. I am working on 4 different windows computers, getting ready to implement a Novell/SuSE …

Total Google Email – 6 months later

As many of you know, I made the decision several months ago to switch to a totally web-based email system. Of course my preference was Google’s Gmail so naturally I went with Google Apps for my domain. 6 months later – I don’t regret it at all. There are just too many advantages to name them all, but let me …