FAQICA: spam

13 November 2010

1 minute videos for absolute beginners, from Auntie

BBC Webwise have put lots of little videos on-line which answer those little questions you may know the answers to but perhaps some of your students, or your Mum, doesn't. Some seem a little pointless and one even confused me more but most are cute and you may be able to use some of them in a lesson or something.

They're all available at this link.

Here's the list:

How do I use a digital camera?
How do I stop getting spam?
How can I make free phone calls online?
What is the internet?
What is a firewall?
How do I prevent ID fraud?
How can I build my own website?
What is a search engine?
What is social networking?
What is podcasting or vodcasting?
What is online shopping?
Buying a computer
What is e-mail?
What are computer viruses?
How do I download files?
What is BBC iPlayer?

As I said, you'll know the answers but FAQICA has to broaden its appeal a bit and the Firesheep post was a bit heavy. Just keeping in with my dumber readers.http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009sbnn

14 January 2007

anti-virus software

Sometime ago I wrote elsewhere about the internet go-slow experienced after installing McAfee Security Centre. Things did improve but I still find that when it's scanning everything slows still and that seems to take an age to complete. I guess I could schedule that for another time but I'm not inclined to leave the computer running all night so, when it's on it's on because I want to use it. I have also got fed up with being greeted every day with the Big Brother messages that I am not protected just because I don't use their spamkiller or privacy tools. I finally decided to get rid of it completely and have installed the free Avast! software which doesn't seem to interfere with my activity anything like as much. SpamButcher continues to do a good job with spam which has risen to several hundred a day and Thunderbird spots what it does let through.

On the very first scan Avast! found Win32:small-AMI, a trojan, lurking in some music software I'd had for a year. That was very satisfying (and might explain the hefty spam). Windows own firewall seems to do its job so thanks for the ride McAfee but, for now, it's farewell and here's to decent speed surfing again.

faqica??

Frequently asked questions I can answer. I used to have piles of notes about all sorts of ICT things that I needed for classes but nowadays there doesn't seem to be much of that sort of training so most of the time I'm answering individual questions about how to do this or that. Often I'll reply in an e-mail or scribble something down or just go and show people on the job and it occurred to me that all that one-off effort could be put to better use if I could at least make a list of the ones I remembered, and so here we go.