As an IT professional, I consider myself to be more careful than your average Internet user when it comes to things like viruses.  I only download things from trusted sources, I have a virus scanner running all the time and I try to restrict myself to known, safe sites.  This last point though, becomes more difficult whe you’re using something like Entrecard.

Like many Entrecard users, I have around 300 bookmarks that I use in order to maximise the number of sites that I visit, and to restrict myslef to those that I’ve visited before that I deemed both “intersting” and “safe”.  This allows me to open the sites in blocks of 10 and quickly scan them for new, interesting content and to drop my Entrecard on their widget.

This worked really well until yesterday, when one of my regular sites suddenly hit me with a full-screen popup ad, which bypassed my Firefox popup blocker!  By the time I’d closed the popup, there was a new window open telling me that I needed to install some new XP Antivirus software, which had only a “Accept and bgein install” button!

From the task manager, I found that this was a real program that was running so I quickly killed it, only to find that I had a new desktop wallpaper, with a replica of a dialog showing that I had a virus threat!  At this point, I tried to put my original wallpaper back, only to find that the tab on the dialog box had been removed!

Further investigation revealed a whole host of new applications, with seemingly random names, and some new entries in my registry.  I cleaned the PC by hand, but it was too late and the damage was done – my PC was useless!

Facing the prospect of delivering a training course next week from my laptop, but being in Birmingham at a client, I had no choice but to change my plans and make the 2 hour drive to my office to re-image my laptop.  This process was relatively painless, but has left me wary and missing a few key applications.  FUrther research seems to suggest that some form of trojan made it onto my PC, which tried to then install the XPAntivirus virus.

I would urge you all to be ultr-cautious at the moment, and to watch out for some research that I’ll be doing into personal firewalls!!!

I came across an interesting new site today called Streamocracy.  In general, it seems to be a technology focused website aimed specifically at video sharing.

However, what caught my eye was their Newswire section.  It seems that what they’re doing here is aggregating RSS feeds from other technology-related sites across the Web and archiving recent content on their servers.  It’s essentially the same idea as what we see with Slashdot, only in this case, the posts are re-published “as-is”, rather than having a comment written by an editor (which is how Slashdot work).

I would encourage you to check them out – particularly the Newswire section (http://www.streamocracy.com/newswire/index.php) and to leave a comment here to share with us all what you think of their service!

Enjoy!

Like Christmas, it comes once a year and you get loads of presents that you didn’t know you wanted!  Yes, that’s right, Microsoft’s TechEd Europe is back, and this year it’s in Barcelona, Spain! 

I’m writing this post at around 4am as I’m just about to leave for the airport.  My company’s got a booth at TechEd, and they’ve also arranged a full delegate pass for me!

I intend to bring you news, insights and hopefully pictures on a daily basis so that anyone who can’t make the event can keep up with the 100% Platform Independent Opinions that this site is famous for!

Watch this space……

[Exit John  - running late and having to trek to the airport now....!]

A small, tucked away news item from IDG caught my eye this morning.  It was one of those “On this day…” lists that most people ignore, but the word Linux seemed to jump out at me.  It turns out that the first version of the Linux kernel (0.02) was released to the public on this day in 1991!

I did some research, as this had piqued my curiosity….

http://www.linux.org had nothing specific on this – even in their section on the “Timeline” of the Linux OS.  Even Wikipedia – usually a great source of information for me – was unable to help!

I eventually uncovered a post in another blog that talks about the release in some detail.  You can read that at http://kerneltrap.org/node/14037.