January 2012

Dear Client,

We saw a brief outage last month of 1 hour and a few minutes later, ½ hour.  The root cause was a configuration error on the part of our provider’s provider.  Once the right person got in the loop, the problem went away pretty quickly.

As you know, we don’t hold back in sharing our experience if we know the answer to a technical question, whether it’s Internet-related or not.  One of our clients had us stumped last month when their screen suddenly starting appearing as if they were looking at it through a mirror.  Huh??  I never even heard of that!  Didn’t know it was possible.

Well, apparently it is.  He found a super-geek that lives in the Orange County, California area who had seen it before and was able to fix it (and a bunch of other things as well that were goofed up on the client’s workstation).  The tech’s name is David Campbell.  If you ever need a really good computer geek, give him a call at 714-529-5831.  He’s been around as long as I have and has outstanding skills.  Very reasonable, too.

Once in a while we hear about something that is way cool.  One of the biggest issues with the Internet is the amount of viruses, hacking and associated spam (via hacked computers) that we all have to put up with.  It has made the Internet a much less enjoyable place to be in.  While anti-virus packages try to keep up, they are always playing catch-up and not everyone (unfortunately) uses anti-virus packages.

What if there was a behavior pattern common to all viruses and malware that didn’t rely on definition files?  Something common to all of them that could be spotted and used to effectively block them?

This question drove some researchers at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) and they spent a lot of time thinking about it and looking at the behavior patterns.  And found one.  The result is a product called Blade.  While it is still in development, you can read about it at www.blade-defender.org.  This has the potential to eliminate viruses and (over time) most spam from the Internet.  Why spam?  Most spam is now sent through infected home computers.  Spammers don’t use real mail servers—we will block them immediately if we get spam from a real server.  So 99.99% of spam comes from infected users’ workstations.   Hopefully it will be released this year.

We had family stay with us last month.  While my step-daughter worked with Shirley in her art studio, her husband helped me install the new workshop cabinets.  That process is now complete and for the first time in my life, I have a real woodworking shop that I’m not ashamed to show someone.  That is one of the best Christmas presents I’ve ever received—that of someone’s time and skills.  They are now back in Oregon, and I’ve already been asking ‘When can Bill come down again and play?’ :)

Hoping you all had a great Christmas season.  And I hope 2012 will be better than the last few years.

Best wishes!

Sincerely,

Ben Conner