Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Side Note for Entrepreneurs!

This is a bit of a side note, but I was looking through my notes of the past year. This is a bit of some helpful advice to those who may be in a similar spot who are striving, building and persevering in this economy with their small business.

Perseverance

Don’t ever think of giving up as an option.
*
You must do whatever it takes
*
Keep going – success is often just around the corner
*
Perseverance is probably the most important trait of successful entrepreneurs

Source: www.bizlaunch.ca

If you have never been to one of their seminars I would highly recommend it. Tonnes of FREE professional advice for those starting and running their small biz.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Monday, January 26, 2009

Happy Chinese New Year!

Not to take away from the post below, but this seems more important.

Wish you all a Happy Chinese New Year! Wish you all the best in the year to come!

Here's an amazing site to check out what's your Chinese sign and what's your outlook this year!!!

http://www.chinesezodiachoroscope.com/

Coming soon: Superduper is Super Duper!

After talking with a resident mac guru I checked out a few gem utilities.

The next post will be some great administrative and backup functions for you mac users.

I'll cover:

- Imaging your Mac with Superduper!
- Migrating your data and apps with the mac migration assistant!

Not to leave you XP users out of the loop, I plan on doing a post on slipstreaming a SP3 xp installation.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Creating a strong password.

In light of what I've been recently researching and posting about virus and trojans which are here:

15 Million PCs Infected

and

Antivirus 2009, What a Pain!

I felt obligated to post this one.

OK, Where do we start,

Creating a Strong password

Pick a strong password. There are a few great guidelines to having a secure password.
- At least 6 Characters
- Have the password contain both alphabet and numeric characters
- If possible, have the password contain non-character symbols like these: @#$%^&**()!
- Try not to use straight forward dictionary words, as a start someone who really wanted to get into your account will somehow utilize a program and it will start with the dictionary and names.

As a great example, We’ll create one here, start with a phrase like:

Merry christmas everyone

*Keep the spaces in since they are non-standard characters. We’ll add more later.

Merry christmas everyone

*pick some letters to substitue with numbers for this example I’ll choose to replace the “E” with the number 3, and the “o” with a zero “0”

M3rrychristmas3v3ry0n3

Next put some more non-standard characters in there. I’ll choose to replace the “I” with an exclamation mark ! In total I'll add one to replace the "I" and another at the end just for fun.

M3rrychr!stmas3v3ry0n3!

And there you have it. We have just built a very strong password. Although I would stongly recommend not to use this password for your personal use, I’m sure you could use your creativity and pick out a password that is right for you.

General notes about passwords, the people who usually want access to your system are sometimes the people who may come in contact with you frequently, so using for example, your children’s names, your phone number, the company you work for would be highly not recommended.

15 million PC's infected with Confliker

Update:

Apparently this thing is sooo out of control.. Microsoft now has a bounty on it.

Microsoft dangles $250,000 carrot for capture of Conficker creator

15 million PC's infected with Confliker

All I can say about this one is that it takes advantage of weak passwords like "123456" and "password".

wow.. I'm not using those passwords for any systems again.

update: Forget about what I just said about easy passwords, this sucker has a built in password cracker!

"The worm also has a password-cracker that is adept at cracking administrative accounts or other computers, though very strong passwords should make that much harder, Cross says."

By Ellen Messmer , Network World , 01/23/2009
Source: Network World

Antivirus 2009, What a pain!

All I do all day is work with computers, and what myself and my colleagues have been witness to is every other indecent we get in seems to be someone contracting the hoax trojan antivirus 2009.

It seems this thing is really wide spread.

As of December approx 400,000 machines infected

You might get it visiting some random page and and a pop-up gives you some window scaring you with how many viruses you have on your machine, then from there on, you can click and install, you can even click through more once you installed the program to actually pay for the program.

It will stay on your system, paying and giving your credit card does nothing to get rid of it. (mind you, you'll probably have bigger issues if you did that but will only find out when you credit card statement comes in).

Microsoft has declared a fix.

The official microsoft fix is here.

Here is also 2 links I found very useful for removing the program manually, if the microsoft fix doesn't work.

Why shouldn't this microsoft fix work I say? Well it was on the Microsoft platform that this Trojan had spread itself.

I found a source for quick removal.

I gotta give my sources credit. You can check out srajure's profile page here.


Video



Also srajure's further detailed information and instructions on how to remove it.