Sygate

At first it will give lots of pop up windows demanding you tell it what to do. Do the right things first time and these will soon stop. The first time you launch a program like Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player - in fact any program which uses the internet connection - tell Sygate to “remember my answer” and “yes”, let the program connect - This way it will remember that if you launch that program in the future you want it to access the internet without asking again.

Each time you install or update Security Software like the antivirus it will ask if you want the changed program to have the same rights. Click remember my answer, then yes.

Only click Yes if you did something to access the net or if its a security program like the antivirus, adaware (see below) or spybot (see below) which updates itself.

At other times, if Sygate asks if you want something to have access to the net when you have not launched it - RealPlayer does this a lot for example - and if it asks if you want to accept incoming connections you have not asked for explicitly, you can click “remember my answer” then “No”.

These habits keep you safe from accidentally giving a hacker permanant access rights.

For the first time, a majority of US citizens believe, along with the rest of the world, that the war in Iraq was wrong. Fifty Six per cent felt that America was not justified in it’s illegal action.

Having marked the day America lost their war in Iraq, I feel a need to mark this too. America now knows it was wrong. It’s official. As a result America no longer has the heart to “win” this war. They will pull out at some point earlier than expected and leave a mess.

However messed up and misrepresented the American power systems may be it is still the majority that matter in the US. It is just a shame they had not worked some of this out before they voted Mr George Warmonger Bush back into power.

An Islamic scholar on BBC Radio 4’s Today Program confirmed the meaning of Jihad as the personal battle each of us faces to manifest the world of ‘God’. Roughly as I described it in an earlier post.

Quite simply, any true Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, ecologist or environmentalist is engaged in this endeavour. We are all of us, at least all of us ’spiritual types’, Jihadis, trying to help promulgate a world of truth and justice, a world of ‘God’. I say this despite being a Buddhist and atheist. My understanding of the word ‘God’ should perhaps be explained: ‘God’ is a word people use to describe the things they perceive yet cannot understand - especially if they are afraid of them.

Big Brother was watching a little more closely than I would have wished, until this morning. My nieghbour took umbrance at the presence of the secret spy camera installed outside our flats and removed it.

He’s got a short fuse, my nieghbour, and having seen the camera last night, by this morning he knew he was ready to take direct action. We followed the cables back to their source. Which turned out to be the CCT Computer for the block we live in. We knew cameras followed us as far as the lifts. We did not know there was a camera following us to our front door.

We are waiting now for the man at the council to let us know what’s what. Our floor is the only one governed by such scrupulous security arrangements so I am sure there must be records of this sort of thing.

Viruses, Hackers, Trojans all rely on people not being scrupuluous about their (Windows, by and large) PC’s health. It is simple, free and will take 2 hours to set up then 1 hour weekly to maintain and secure your PC.

No excuse is good enough. It is not the infected PC’s health that matters, it is that the PC owner’s friends suffer. They are bombarded with viruses, scam attacks, phishing and all other nasties and all because a lazy PC owner does not think or act.

Do this:

You must complete all steps before using the computer or the internet for anything else:

1/ download:

Sygate Free Firewall. Damn Good Product.

Adaware SE Personal Free Anti-Advertising, Tracking, Spyware.

antivir Free Antivirus by H+BEDV Datentechnik GmBH. Top-Notch. Regularly updated, German technology.

Spybot - Search & Destry Another anti-spyware, anti-trojan, antihacker software and a diamond product like Adaware - Two is better than one - in this area only.

2/ Disconnect from the internet. Only reconnect when an installation asks to update andthen use for no other purpose until all scans, including double-Spybot s&d if needed in step 7, are complete.

3/ Uninstall your existing antivirus & firewall and turn off windows XP firewall.

4/ Reboot.

5/ Install Antivir. Let it run through, including full scan. Check out program options, get familiar: it is your new antivirus: It is free, regularly updated and works really well.

6/ Install Sygate, your new really excellent free firewall.

Sygate Tutorial: Skip if you’re a natural.

Normally Sygate will silently protect you, in the background mostly, letting you know if anything really bad starts to happen and asking if you want certain things to happen from time to time.

Sygate will tell you when an update is available. Install it.

6/ Install and run Adaware SE Personal. This program defeats advertising software, tracking software, dataminers, trojans, cookies - allsorts of nasties. Update it and run it once a week. When you run the scan for the first time it will come up with a lot of nasties. Don’t worry. Just right click any item in the list, chose “select all” from the list by left clicking on it, then delete them all. Do the same on your weekly scan, you want none of it.

7/ Install and run Spybot s&d. It does much the same as adaware - Both run once a week keeps you really safe. Do the same in all respects as with Adaware: Update and run once a week; Delete everything it comes up with. The first time and other scans it might at the end say it could not fix all problems: Say Yes when it asks to run at boot-up/startup. Then, when finished running, reboot/restart the computer and it will run immediately - run through and fix all.

There is a tab in the program where you can immunize the system and silently protect against bad programs and pages - click yes for all the options you can find here for the best protection. And Don’t worry if SpyBot reports a DSO Exploit and fails to fix it. Its a small bug with no consequence - ignore it.

8/ Connect to the net, connect to Windows Update and install updates. If you never did this it can take a while, especially on a slow connection and might require one or ttwo reboots - don’t bother if yours is an illegal windows XP, it won’t work, and anything pre windows-98 is history.

Don’t forget. Update and run Antivir, Adaware & Spybot once a week. You’ll be safe as houses my friend. Once a month do windows update as well, you’ll be safer than most people you know.

Maribel Dominguez has broken down barriers of machismo higher even than Maegaret Thatcher. Breaking into the heady world of Mexican Professional Football, she is the first woman ever signed to a pro club to play alongside men. To have achieved this in Mexico, of all places, is a double whammy for real freedom for women: freedom from stereotype.

Mexican football club signs woman - The Guardian

The term Jihad I understand to be often misquoted. It is really the night of the soul faced by Christ in the desert and Buddha under the Banyan tree. This night of the soul is something available to all of us if we seek the ultimate form of knowledge available in this lifetime. That was what Christ and the Buddha also shared and taught. “The kingdom of heaven is within”. “Know thyself” - (Christian), “self knowledge is the key to nirvana” - (Buddhism). Certainly there will be parallels to most of this in most major religions. All founders of all religions sought peace for all. Why do we fight?

George Bush is a consummate modern politician, an operator. In that respect he deserves the position he holds which calls for his sense of what smells right. Unfortunately, that means the USA is effectively governed by someone little more ‘intelligent’ than a dog.

The Democrats cannot boast either. Their last President behaved in almost as animalistic fashion as Mr Bush, on top of which they have lost, twice, to a doggish President Bush. It is no wonder the voters stuck with what they knew facing the paucity of the real choice offered them.

Nobody in particular can be put at fault for these things. When politics demands doggish politicians it is accidents of history that lead us where we go, not men, because what smells good is not always the right thing, and because the people who lead us all fit a certain limited size mold, including that nasal political perfection.

William Shatner has been gracing our screens on breakfast cereal adverts over the summer. There is something very annoying about the character he plays (ostensibly himself). Then I started discovering his musical genius, and now I just feel a bit sorry for him. I think Bones would say “It’s music Jim - but not as we know it”

William Shatner Interprets Pulp’s ‘Common People’

William Shatner Interprets Rocket Man at the 1978 Sci-Fi festival

Kimberly Quinn began her affair with David Blunket shortly after her Marriage to Stephen Quinn. At the time she was heard to complain bitterly of men and cheating - terrible things, both of them. That she was in bed with two men shows the total level of hypocrisy that Mrs Quinn is capable of.

David Blunkett has paid the price for crossing a woman he thought loved him. It was certainly naive of him to “look over” the visa application for Mrs Quinn’s nanny. At the end of the day, however, this was a convenient knife. Mrs Quinn gladly stabbed Mr Blunket in the back with it: to demoralise him, to threaten him into going away and leaving her “perfect” family intact.

“Ev’rybody’s building the big ships and the boats,

Some are building monuments,

Others, jotting down notes,

Ev’rybody’s in despair,

Ev’ry girl and boy

But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,

Ev’rybody’s gonna jump for joy.

Come all without, come all within,

You’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.”

Bob Dylan - Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)