I was at a friends home a couple of weeks ago, and he was complaining about a virus on his computer. Try as he might, he could not get rid of this virus. I total look and thought I was able to remove it, but he said that the next day it came back.

There is nothing worse than computer problems, and there’s nothing better than free software to prevent them in the first place.

One of my favorite utilities of all time, Winpatrol,  has just updated to their 2008 version, and the company owner has provided me with an affiliate version that I can give away at no charge.

Here’s what I went through on Christmas Day, just to get songs we legally purchased through Itunes to play on my kids new MP3 players…

I will never spend another dollar with Itunes after what I went through. Tell me again why anyone would pay $.99 a song, only to (eventually) figure out that you’re not allowed to listen to them on any device other than an Apple brand music player?

Virus Marketing -

When I ran a computer store in the late 90’s, a lot of people would bring in computers with viruses and spyware to be removed, and they would usually ask us what the “point” was in these acts of cyber vandalism.

Google has the ability to Mark your search listings with a warning to users if they think you are doing something wrong, or trying to download spyware onto people’s computer when they visit. You may not even know they’re doing it until you see it, and worse, you may not know if your site is even compromised until they do!

There has been a huge increase in the number of viruses I have been receiving via e-mail over the past 2 1/2 weeks. At first I thought it was just me, but an Oregon Computer Consultants meeting the other night, I asked around, and others had noticed the same trend.

While I’m flattered that someone thinks enough of my content to steal it right off my webpage and post it as their own, I’ve never actually had it happen with my website copy before. It’s happened with the occasional article I’ve written, but nothing else.

I can’t believe I fell for it. One of my MSN Messenger contacts APPARENTLY sent me a chat message, saying this…

Surfing the web Ive found this useful tool in http//Get-Messenger.com/?en
Just entering your MSN Messenger account you can find out who has removed you from his/her contact list.I hope you find it useful!

Today I got notified by a hosting customer that his website had their content and design copied and reposted under another domain name hosted elsewhere.

The copied domain is here - www.nim-company.com while the ORIGINAL design and content are here - www.webpositionexpert.com.

The original site is a friend with a business in Antigua, while the content and design thief is apparently named Robert Soloway, and is in my back yard, up in Washington State.

To say “spam is out of control” is not really accurate, so let me give you some figures that will put it in perspective.

For my own domain pdxtc.com, August 2006 brought me these numbers…

• 19,306 total incoming emails (and we only have 9 addresses!)
• 16,209 were identified and blocked as spam before a human ever saw them

When I saw the title of an SEOmoz blog post in my feedreader, I tried to make it the first story of the day. When I clicked to read it however, the article was gone. Hoping to read the cached copy, I searched on Google, but the text was not found.

My son and I briefly fell for a hoax email from one of his little league parents that claimed August 27th, the Red Planet would be spectacular, and visible wit hthe naked eye as large as the moon.