Q-Dir

Q-Dir is a free file management / explorer replacement program with a light footprint and a nice set of features. It integrates very well with Windows’ desktop environment and employs an innovative interface that makes it very easy to work with multiple file panes. Can be run portably from USB
http://www.freewaregenius.com/2008/11/21/q-dir-the-portable-file-management-program-that-could/

Here are my top EIGHT favorite features that Q-Dir provides:
1- Manage your files across multiple panes: all programs of this type offer this, but Q-Dir gets the prize for most intuitive implementation whereby it allows you to select the arrangement of panes that you want by clicking on small icons in the toolbar. The Q Dir people deserve credit for this interface which works extremely well.

2- Access frequently used folders (quicklinks): you can have instant access to your favorite folders and organize them within a folder structure. Note that this is different from saving ’favorites’ (see next point).

3- Save “Favorites”: as in, save a view comprising multiple folders across a particular distribution of panes. So let’s say that for a project you like to work with the “deskop” folder in the left hand pane and two panes on the right hand side showing “Folder A” on top and “Folder B” on the bottom; Q Dir allows you to save this entire configuration as a favorite. You can also save this as an object on the desktop, whereby double clicking this file will immediately open all of these folders in the configuration they were saved.

4- Filter box: you can access a filter box in the lower right hand corner of each pane in order to hone in on a file or group of files that you want to work with. The version I reviewed recently implemented an “always wildcard” option whereby anything you type is wildcarded (i.e. type in .mp3 and the program assumes *.mp3*) - very cool.

5- Installs an “open with QDir” shell extension: optional (see screenshot). From the “Extras” menu go to “System” then check “Add Q-Dir to the shell context menu”.

6- Works very well as a direct replacement to Explorer: I am now using Q-Dir in place of the default Windows Explorer and am extremely happy with it. Like Windows Explorer you can set Q-Dir to open to a single pane by default and to list the folder name in the title bar. One thing to consider, though, is that Q-Dir takes up approx 10-12 megs in memory, and opening multiple windows will launch multiple instances of the program whose overall memory use can add up. If you want to use Q-Dir as a replacement to Explorer do the following: add Q-Dir to the context menu (see point#5 above) then open any folder normally in Windows Explorer; next go to Tools, Folder Options, ’File Types’ tab then scroll down to “Folder” in the list. Once highlighted click advanced, select “*Q-Dir” and then click on “Set Default”. Q-Dir will now be the default program used to open any folder. Note: to revert back to Explorer, go through the same process and re-select “open” as default.

7- Uses the default Explorer context menu and column views: I like this as I am pretty invested in what I install in my PCs right click context menu and am sometimes dismayed when a “file manager” type apps takes over with it’s own context menu. I also like that it will use the columns enabled in explorer, which means that it will work with some Explorer extensions such as Folder Size and HobComment that customize column views.

8- Portable: either run the installer then check “portable-install” or simply rename Q-Dir_Installer.exe to Q-Dir.exe if you want a portable version.
Other features:

• Color filters: you can optionally define a standard font color for each displayed file type or for folders (e.g. list all .zip files in red, .mp3 files in blue, etc.). Q-Dir comes with a pre-defined color scheme that you can change at will, or switch off color coding altogether (which is my preference).
• Media file previews: Q-Dir supports (optional) previews for media files (including video, audio, and images) and PDF. Two caveats here (1) you will need to have the appropriate codec installed to see video, and (2) you apparently need Adobe Reader installed to preview PDF (I have PDF-Exchange Viewer and PDF previews do not display).
• Zip files: Q-Dir provides the ability to browse and perform file operations on zip folders seamless just as you would a normal folder.
• Export: files and directory structure to XLS, CSV, TXT, and HTML.Other features: keyboard shortcuts for most functions, quick online searches for selected files or objects, an on-screen magnifier, and others.

Wish list (or how this program can be even better):

• Calculating folder sizes: for all folders by default or for selected folders (in the absence of this you could use the Folder Size extension in conjunction with Q-Dir to get this.
• The ability to “swap” visible folders between panes: this is a mainstay of most programs like this one, strangely absent here.

The verdict: this is definitely one of my favorite file management/explorer replacement programs. I have been using Q-Dir to replace Windows explorer for about a week now and am very happy with the functionality that it provides as well as it’s speed and responsiveness. Previously I had been using the excellent UltraExplorer, and while you cannot compare the two programs directly (UltraExplorer is much more feature rich and a more complex program overall), I found Q-Dir more suitable as a direct replacement for windows explorer because it was in fact much more responsive. Overall I can say that Q-Dir manages to strike a perfect balance between providing a host of excellent features and functions while maintaining a very good interface design and a good user experience.

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WordPress 2.6

WordPress 2.6 Stable Version ထြက္ရွိလာပါၿပီ။ ဒီတစ္ေခါက္ WordPress 2.6 ကို Philadelphia က အေမရိကန္ လူမည္း Jazz ေတးဂီတ ပညာရွင္ တစ္ဦးျဖစ္သူ McCoy Tyner ကို ဂုဏ္ျပဳလ်က္ Code Name ကို “Tyner” ဟု ေပးထားေၾကာင္း သိရပါတယ္။

WordPress 2.6 ၏ အဓိက ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲ ထားမႈမ်ား
၁။ အဘိဓာန္ (Wiki) ပံုစံ ပို႔စ္ မ်ားကို တည္းျဖတ္ျခင္း - ဒီ Feature အသစ္ကို အသံုးျပဳၿပီး WordPress Blog တစ္ခုမွာ ပါ၀င္ေရးသား ေနၾကသူမ်ား အေနနဲ႔ ယခင္တစ္ေယာက္ ေရးၿပီးသား ပို႔စ္ကို၊ ေနာက္တစ္ဦးမွ ျပင္ဆင္ တည္းျဖတ္ျခင္းမ်ား လုပ္တဲ့ အခါ ဘာေတြ၊ ျပင္သြားတယ္၊ ဘယ္စကားလံုး ေတြကို ေတာ့ ထပ္ထည့္သြားတယ္ စသျဖင့္ သိရွိ ႏိုင္ပါမယ္။ (ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ ယခင္က စာပံုႏွိပ္တိုက္ေတြမွာ စာစီဆရာ၊ စာျပင္သမား၊ ပရုဖတ္သူ၊ အယ္ဒီတာ၊ အယ္ဒီတာခ်ဳပ္. စသျဖင့္ စာတစ္ပုဒ္ကို အဆင့္ဆင့္ အမွားရွာၿပီး အေကာင္းဆံုး ကို ရယူ ျပဳျပင္ႏိုင္ပံုမ်ိဳး နဲ႔ အလားသ႑ာန္တူ ပါတယ္။) အကယ္၍ ေနာက္ဆံုး ျပင္ဆင္ တည္းျဖတ္သူမွ ပထမဆံုး ေရးသားသူရဲ့ မူရင္း ေဆာင္းပါးကို ျပန္လည္သိုမွီးမႈ (Restore) လုပ္ခ်င္တယ္ ဆိုရင္လည္း လုပ္ႏိုင္တဲ့ အခြင့္အေရး ေတြကို ပါ Wikipedia မွာကဲ့ သို႔ တစ္ပါတည္း ရရွိေစပါမယ္။
Press This! - ၀ဘ္ဘေရာက္ဇာ၏ မည္သည့္ေနရာမွ မဆို မိမိဘေလာ့ဂ္ သို႔ ပို႔စ္ တင္ႏိုင္ျခင္း - ဒီ Feature ေလးရဲ့ သေဘာ သဘာ၀ကို Tumblr, Facebook ႏွင့္ Delicious စတဲ့ Mini Blogging လို႔ ေခၚႏိုင္တဲ့ Web 2.0 စတိုင္လ္ Sharing ဆိုဒ္ ေတြကို အသံုးျပဳေနတဲ့ သူေတြ အေနနဲ႔ စိမ္းမွာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ အလြယ္ကူဆံုး ဥပမာေပးရမယ္ ဆိုရင္ ျမန္မာေတြနဲ႔ အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား အကၽြမ္းတ၀င္ ရွိတဲ့ Delicious နဲ႔ ဥပမာ ေပးရပါလိမ့္မယ္။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ Delicious ကို အသံုးျပဳတဲ့ အခါ ကိုယ္ ႀကိဳက္တဲ့ Web Page ေတြ ေတြ႔ရင္ ကိုယ့္ ဘေရာက္ဇာကေန တစ္ခါတည္း Delicious Website မွာ Bookmark လုပ္ႏိုင္ဖို႔ အတြက္ Browser ထဲ ထည့္သြင္း ထားလို႔ ရတဲ့ Delicious Plugin ေလးရွိပါတယ္။ အဲဒီ Plugin ေလးကို Install လုပ္ၿပီးသကာလမွာ မိမိ ဘယ္၀ဘ္ဆိုဒ္ကိုပဲ ေရာက္ေရာက္ ဘေရာက္ဇာရဲ့ Address Bar ေဘးမွာ ေပၚေနတဲ့ Delicious Button ေလးကို ႏွိပ္လိုက္တယ္ ဆိုရင္ပဲ အဲဒီ ဆိုဒ္ကို မိမိႀကိဳက္ ႏွစ္သက္ရာ မွတ္ခ်က္တစ္ခုခုႏွင့္ ေရးသားမွတ္သားၿပီး Delicious Website ထဲသို႔ မိမိႀကိဳက္ရာ က႑မွာ ခြဲျခား မွတ္သား သိမ္းဆည္း ထား ႏိုင္ပါၿပီ။

အခု WordPress 2.6 မွာလည္း Press This! ရဲ့ သေဘာ သဘာ၀က အထက္ပါ အတိုင္းပါပဲ။ Admin Panel ရဲ့ Writing Page ေအာက္ဆံုးမွာ ရွိတဲ့ Press This! Button ေလးကို မိမိရဲ့ ဘေရာက္ဇာ Bookmark Bar သို႔မဟုတ္ Address Bar ရဲ့ လြတ္တဲ့ ေနရာ တစ္ခုခုမွာ Drag & Drop လုပ္ၿပီး ဆြဲထည့္ထားလိုက္တာနဲ႔ မိမိဘယ္ေနရာပဲ၊ ဘယ္၀ဘ္ဆိုဒ္ ကိုပဲ ေရာက္ေနပါေစ. ဘေရာက္ဇာ မွာရွိတဲ့ Press This! Button ေလးကို ႏွိပ္လိုက္ရံုနဲ႔ ပို႔စ္ အသစ္တင္ႏိုင္တဲ့ Admin Panel Wirting Interface ကို မိမိ ေနာက္ဆံုးေရာက္ရွိခဲ့ တဲ့ Web စာမ်က္ႏွာက သတင္းအခ်က္အလက္ ေတြပါ ယူေဆာင္လ်က္ တစ္ပါတည္း ေရာက္ရွိသြားမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

၃။ ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္း ဂီယာျဖင့္ သင့္ WP Blog အား ျမန္ႏႈန္းျမွင့္ျခင္း - ဒါကေတာ့ ယခင္တစ္ေလာက ပဲ WordPress.Com အမွန္ေတာ့ Turbo Gear ဆိုတာ Google က ကမကထ လုပ္ၿပီး တည္ေထာင္ထားတဲ့ Browser Extension Opensource Project တစ္ခုျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

သူ႔ရဲ႕ အၾကမ္းဖ်င္း သေဘာ သဘာ၀ ကေတာ့ အင္တာနက္ ႏွင့္ ဘေရာက္ဇာ အသံုးျပဳၿပီး Webpage မ်ားကို ၾကည့္ရႈ ေနသူတိုင္း အတြက္ လိုအပ္တဲ့ Data ေတြ၊ ရုပ္သံ ဖိုင္ေတြကို အဲဒီ Webpage ကို ဖြင့္တိုင္း မိမိၾကည့္ရႈတဲ့ Web Server ကေနတဆင့္ ေဒါင္းလုဒ္ လုပ္လုပ္ေနရတဲ့ ဒုကၡက ကင္းေ၀း ေစဖို႔၊ မိမိစက္အတြင္းမွာ Local Server တစ္ခု တည္ေဆာက္ေပးၿပီး Data တစ္ခုကို Webpage တစ္ခု ဖြင့္တိုင္း ထပ္ခါတစ္လဲလဲ ေဒါင္းလုဒ္ လုပ္ရျခင္းမွ ကင္းေ၀းေစကာ User အတြက္ မလိုအပ္တဲ့ Traffic ျပန္းတီးမႈ မွသက္သာေစၿပီး Webserver မ်ားကိုလည္း Bandwidth ျပဳန္းတီးမႈ မွသက္သာ ေစဖို႔ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ယခု WordPress 2.6 မွာ Gear Support လုပ္လိုက္ၿပီ ျဖစ္တဲ့ အတြက္ WP Blog ပိုင္ရွင္ေတြ အေနနဲ႔ မိမိရဲ့ စာရႈသူေတြကိုေရာ၊ မိမိကိုယ္တိုင္ပါ Google Gear ကို မိမိရဲ့ ၀ဘ္ဘေရာက္ဇာအတြင္း အင္စေတာလ္ လုပ္ထားျခင္း ျဖင့္ ဘေလာ့ဂ္ တစ္ခုအတြက္ ဘံုအသံုးျပဳေနၾက ျဖစ္တဲ့ CSS file, Java Script File မ်ားကဲ့သို႔ေသာ Common Data မ်ားကို မိမိရဲ့ Local Server အတြင္း ထည့္သြင္း သိမ္းဆည္းထားၿပီး သကာလ ေရးသူေရာ၊ ဖတ္သူ အတြက္ပါ WordPress Blog မ်ားရဲ့ အျမန္ႏႈန္း တိုးတက္လာမွာ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိေစအပ္ပါတယ္ခင္ဗ်ာ။

၄။ မိမိအသံုးျပဳလိုတဲ့ Theme ကို ႀကိဳတင္ၾကည့္ရႈႏိုင္ျခင္း - ယခင္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ WordPress Blog ေတြမွာ Install လုပ္ထားတဲ့ Theme ေတြကို ၂-လက္မ ပတ္လည္ Thumbnail ပံုေလးေလာက္ပဲ ျမင္ေတြ႔ၾကည့္ရႈႏိုင္ၿပီး အသံုးျပဳဖို႔ သင့္မသင့္ ဆံုးျဖတ္ခဲ့ၾကရတာပါ။ အခုေတာ့ ခင္ဗ်ားရဲ့ WP Admin Panel ထဲ Install လုပ္ထားတဲ့ ဘယ္ Theme မဆိုကို စာမ်က္ႏွာ ျပည့္ Preview ၊ ရွင္းလင္းစြာ ၾကည့္ရႈ လို႔ ခင္ဗ်ား ႀကိဳက္မႀကိဳက္ တိက်စြာ ဆံုးျဖတ္ႏိုင္ပါၿပီ။

အထက္ပါ ေဖာ္ျပခ်က္ေတြကေတာ့ WordPress 2.6 ရဲ့ အဓိက ျပဳျပင္ ေျပာင္းလဲထားမႈ မ်ားျဖစ္ၿပီး ေအာက္ပါ တို႔ကေတာ့ Wordpress 2.6 ရဲ့ က်န္တဲ့ Smaller New Features ေတြ ျဖစ္ၾကပါတယ္တဲ့။

* Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
* Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
* Bulk management of plugins.
* A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
* Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
* Plugin update notification bubble.
* Customizable default avatars.
* You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
* Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
* Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
* You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
* Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
* Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
* You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
* A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
* Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

WordPress.Org အေနနဲ႔ ကေတာ့ WP 2.5 အသံုးျပဳသူေတြ ကို အဓိကျပဳျပင္ ေျပာင္းလဲမႈေတြ မ်ားစြာ ျပဳလုပ္ထားတဲ့ ဒီ ဗားရွင္း အသစ္ WordPress 2.6 ကို Upgrade လုပ္ၾကဖို႔ကို အေလးအနက္ တိုက္တြန္းထားပါတယ္။

ေနာက္ၿပီး WordPress 2.5 ကေန WordPress 2.6 ကို Upgrade လုပ္မယ္ ဆိုရင္ လုိအပ္တဲ့ သတင္းအခ်က္အလက္ေတြ ရယူႏိုင္ဖို႔ ေအာက္ပါေနရာေတြမွာ အဆင္သင့္ရွိၿပီး သားျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
Standard 3- steps Upgrade Instructions
Upgrading WordPress Extended
ကိုသႀကၤန္ရဲ့ WP Upgrading ျမန္မာ ဗားရွင္း
အကယ္၍ လြယ္လြယ္ကူကူ သက္သက္သာသာပဲ Plugin အကူအညီနဲ႔ WordPress 2.6 ကို Upgrade လုပ္လိုတယ္ ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ ေအာက္ပါ WordPress Plugin က အသံုးျပဳဖို႔ အသင့္ေတာ္ဆံုး ႏွင့္ အေကာင္းဆံုးပါပဲ။ (Updated!)
Download WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin

WordPress 2.6 ကို Upgrade လုပ္မယ္ ဆိုရင္ ဒီအခ်က္အလက္ေတြကို ႀကိဳတင္စဥ္းစား ေဆာင္ရြက္ထားပါ

၁။ သတင္းစုေဆာင္း - ဘာေတြ လိုအပ္သလဲ၊ ဘယ္လို လုပ္မလဲ

၂။ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ကို အတိအက်ခ်ထား - ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ကေတာ့ WP 2.6 ကို ေအာင္ျမင္စြာ Upgrade လုပ္ႏိုင္ေရးေပါ့ဗ်ာ. :)

၃။ လုပ္နည္း လုပ္ဟန္ကို ႀကိဳတင္စဥ္းစား - သူမ်ားက ဒါၿပီးမွ ဟိုဟာ လုပ္ပါ ေျပာေပမယ့္ ကိုယ့္မွာ ဟိုဟာၿပီးမွ ဒါ လုပ္ရတာ လည္း ျဖစ္ခ်င္ျဖစ္ေန လိမ့္မယ္

၄။ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မႈအတြက္ လိုအပ္တာေတြျပင္ဆင္ - မိမိ Blog ကို ျပင္တုန္းဆင္တုန္း ကြန္နက္ရွင္ ျပတ္လို႔ မရဘူးေလ :D

၅။ ဆက္သြယ္ မႈအတြက္ အကြက္ခ်ထား - လုပ္ရင္းကိုင္ရင္း အခက္အခဲ ႀကံဳခဲ့ရင္ အကူအညီေတာင္း လို႔ ရမည့္ သူရွိေအာင္ :D

အထက္ပါ အခ်က္ အလက္ေတြကို အပီအျပင္ ႀကိဳတင္ ျပင္ဆင္ၿပီး သကာလ အားလံုးပဲ WordPress 2.6 ႏွင့္ ေပ်ာ္ရြင္ ေအာင္ျမင္၊ ျမန္ဆန္ သြက္လက္ ဘေလာ့ဂင္း ႏိုင္ၾကသည္ ျဖစ္ေစေသာ္၀္! :D

ရည္ညြန္းကိုးကား

WordPress.Org Blog
WordPress Gear
WordPress Codex

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WordPress version upgrade

WordPress ကို ပိုျမင့္တဲ့ version upgrade လုပ္မယ္ဆိုရင္

လက္ရွိအသံုးျပဳေနတဲ့ WordPress ကို ပိုျမင့္တဲ့ version upgrade လုပ္မယ္ဆိုရင္ ပထမဆံုး backup ကို ေသခ်ာ လုပ္ထားရပါမယ္။ Dashboard / Manage / Export ကေန xml format နဲ႕ backup တစ္ခု မရွိမျဖစ္ လုပ္ထားရပါမယ္။ http://wordpress.org/download က upgrade လုပ္ခ်င္တဲ့ wordpress ေနာက္ဆံုးဗားရွင္း ကို ေဒါင္းလုပ္ခ်ပါ။ မိမိအသံုးျပဳေနတဲ့ hosting က file manager နဲ႕ ျဖစ္ျဖစ္၊ zip ေျဖၿပီး ftp software နဲ႕ျဖစ္ျဖစ္ wordpress install လုပ္ထားတဲ့ folder ထဲကို upload တင္ပါ။ ဥပမာ။ ။ byethost မွာတင္ထားတဲ့ wordpress ဆိုရင္ urblogname/htdocs ေအာက္ကိုေပါ့။ plugins ေတြ themes ေတြ တင္တဲ့ ပံုစံမ်ိဳး အတိုင္းပါပဲ။ အရင္ရွိၿပီးသား ဗားရွင္းအေဟာင္းက ဖိုင္ေတြကို over wirte လုပ္မလားလို႕ ေမးခဲ့ရင္ yes ေပးလိုက္ပါ။ အားလံုးၿပီးရင္ web browser နဲ႕ http://urblogname/wp-admin/upgrade.php ကိုဖြင့္လိုက္ပါ။ urblogname ေနရာက မိမိ blog နာမည္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဥပမာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႕၏စပ္မိစပ္ရာ ဘေလာ့ဂ္ဆိုရင္ http://smsy.iblogger.org/wp-admin/upgrade.php ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ဖြင့္လို႕ရၿပီဆိုရင္ ပံုစံ ၂ ျဖစ္ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ database upgrade လုပ္စရာ မလိုတဲ့ အဆင္ျမင့္တာမ်ိဳး ဆိုရင္ No Upgrade Required ဆိုၿပီး တတ္လာမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္ Continue ႏွိပ္ေပးယံုပါပဲ။ database upgrade လုပ္ဖို႕လိုတယ္ ဆိုရင္ေတာ့ Upgrade WordPress ဆိုၿပီး ေပၚလာပါမယ္ သူေပးထားတဲ့ အတိုင္း click လုပ္ေပးၿပီးရင္ upgrade လုပ္တာ ေအာင္ျမင္ပါၿပီ။
Source: http://mmwordpress.com/upgrade-wordpress/

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Google Talk Multiple Instances

Google Talk: Run Multiple Instances or Login as Multiple Users
Run google talk with the following switch: /nomutex

If you installed google talk to the default location, you can easily create a shortcut to this setting.
1. Right-click on the desktop
2. Select New
3. Select Shortcut
4. Paste this into the text box:"c:\program files\google\google talk\googletalk.exe" /nomutex

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About Attacks to your Computer

About Attacks to your Computer

• What is spyware?
• What is adware?
• What is malware?
• What is parasiteware?
• What is a page hijacker?
• What is a dialer?
• What is a browser plugin?
• What is a commercial keylogger?
• What is a commercial network management tool?
• What is a data miner?
• What is a loyaltyware?
• What is a remote administration tool?
• What is a worm?
• How can I tell that I have spyware on my computer?
• How does spyware get on my computer?
• What is the difference between spyware and viruses?
• How to keep spyware off of my computer?
• Is there any legal protection against spyware?

http://www.spywareterminator.com/support/what-is-spyware.aspx


What is spyware?

Spyware is software that is capable of performing certain operations on your computer without your consent, such as displaying advertisements, collecting your personal information, or changing the configuration of your computer.

Other types of unwanted software can alter to your computer with results ranging from minor annoyances to causing your computer to slow down or crash. These programs have the ability to change your Web browser's home page or search page, or add additional components to your browser you may not need or want. These programs also make it very difficult for you to change your settings back to the way you originally had them. These types of unwanted programs are often labeled as spyware.

What is adware?

Adware is software that displays advertisements. This does not mean that any software that provides advertisements or tracks your on-line activities is adware. For example, you may install a free ad-supported version of software, and you "pay" for the service by agreeing to receive targeted advertisements. If you understand the terms and agree to them, you may have decided that it is a fair tradeoff. You may also have agreed to let the company track your online activities to determine which advertisements to show you. To avoid installing adware if you do not wish to "pay" for the service by receiving targeted advertisements, we recommend that you carefully read the software’s Terms of Use and End User License Agreement.

What is malware?

Malware, or malicious software, is designed specifically to damage your machine or interrupt the normal computing environment. A trojan horse, worm or virus could be classified as malware. Some advertising software can be malicious by trying to re-install itself after you have removed it.


What is parasiteware?

Parasiteware is the term for any adware that by default overwrites certain affiliate tracking links. These tracking links are used by webmasters to sell products and to help fund websites. The controversy is centered on companies like WhenU, eBates, and Top Moxie, popular makers of adware applications. These companies release their software to assist users in getting credit for rebates, cash back shopping, or contributions to funds. To the end user, parasiteware represents little in the way of a security threat.


What is a page hijacker?

Hijacker is an application that attempts to take control of the user's homepage and replace it with one that the hijacker chooses. It is a low security threat, but is annoying. Most hijackers use stealth techniques or trick dialog boxes to perform installation.

Browser hijackers commonly do one or more of the following:

* Change your "search" page and passes all searches to a pay-per-search site
* Change your default home page to the company page. Sometimes the software changes them to a portal featuring porn sites.
* May transmit URLs viewed toward the company server


What is a dialer?

A dialer is a type of software used by pornographic vendors. Once dialer software is downloaded, the user is disconnected from his/her modem's usual Internet service provider, is connected to another phone number and is then billed. While dialers do not spy on users they are malevolent in nature because they can cause huge financial harm to the victim.


What is a browser plugin?

A plugin is a software program that extends the capabilities of your Internet browser in a specific way. Not all browser plugins are harmful and some may be helpful. This category contains mostly dubious browser plugins such as “Search Assistant”, toolbars, etc. that have been known to transmit user data to their creators or have been installed using covert means.


What is a commercial keylogger?

Commercial keylogger is a program designed to monitor user activity. It may be used with or without consent. Since it is sold commercially, most anti-virus vendors do not detect it.


What is a commercial network management tool?

A commercial network management tool is mostly used in (large) corporations. It can log the network traffic passively (sniffing) or examine the logs of proxies, etc. Nothing is installed on the individual computers, the software runs on a central server. They can only log items that pass through the network, but not local items such as the entered passwords, keystrokes or screenshots.


What is a data miner?

A data miner’s primary function is to gather data about an end user. Some adware applications may employ data mining abilities.


What is a loyaltyware?

Loyaltyware is a sub-form of adware. Loyaltyware is a type of software that works around the concept of user loyalty by providing incentives in the form of cash, points, airline miles, or other type of goods while shopping.


What is a remote administration tool?

A remote administration tool is a tool designed to be used by network administrators to remotely control a computer on the network, usually for support or inventory purposes. It may be used for spying purposes.


What is a worm?

A worm is a virus-like program that spreads automatically to other computers by distributing itself via email or other means. A worm spreads itself by attacking other machines and copying itself to the affected machine. Both worms and viruses are self-replicating codes that travel from machine to machine by various means. Both worms and viruses have, as their first objective, merely propagation. Both can be destructive, depending on what payload, if any, they have been given. There are some differences in that worms may replace files, but do not insert themselves into files, while viruses insert themselves into files, but do not replace them.


How can I tell that I have spyware on my computer?

You may have spyware installed on your computer if:

* You see pop-up advertisements even when you're not on a website.
* Your homepage or your browser search settings have changed without your knowledge.
* You have a new toolbar in your browser that you didn't want, and find it difficult to get rid of.
* Your computer takes longer than usual to complete certain tasks.
* You experience a sudden rise in computer crashes.


How does spyware get on my computer?

There are several ways spyware or other unwanted software can intrude your computer. A common trick is to covertly install the software during the installation of other software you want such as a music or video file sharing program. Whenever you are installing something on your computer, make sure you carefully read all disclosures, including the license agreement and privacy statement. Sometimes the inclusion of unwanted software in a given software installation is documented, but it may appear at the end of a license agreement or privacy statement.


What is the difference between spyware and viruses?

The average Internet user has difficulty distinguishing viruses from spyware. However there are slight differences. Both are malicious software, both have the capacity to capture and destroy information, ruin performance, and disrupt business processes.

A virus seeks to infect a computer; to replicate; and to infect as many computers as possible, as quickly as possible. For example, an email-delivered virus (a worm) may search your computer's file system for your Outlook address book and send infected email messages to contacts it finds in the address book. A virus relies on email for propagation, but tries many attack vectors such as file sharing, telnet, FTP, IMs, or any services and programs on your computer that communicate with other computers.

Viruses seek to spread, but spyware tries to stay put as a parasite. Spyware disguises itself as a legitimate application or secretly resides as one more data link library (DLL) or registry setting the average user knows nothing about, so that it can collect information about you, your messaging, browsing behavior and your online preferences. Spyware will embed itself deeply into critical components of your operating system and bloat your memory with its monitoring and collection processing executables. So where virus activities are overt and sufficiently extensive in their impact to attract attention quickly, spyware activities are typically covert and their infestations are often long lasting.

Spyware will exploit your computer of anything it can use for monetary gain, for as long as it can remain attached to the host. Spyware is content to sit on a single computer, to monitor what the user does, as is the case with tracking adware; or influence where the user visits, as is the case with targeting advertisers who use browser helper objects that pop-up ads, substitute search engines, and hijack home pages.

Viruses can be intentionally destructive and have been known to erase or corrupt file systems or abet denial of service attacks. Spyware is more interested in having the host remain healthy: a non-functional computer has neither advertising value nor revenue potential to spyware. So spyware typically remains non-destructive, unless you try to remove it. But many spyware packages are removal resistant: you may uninstall them only to find they reappear when you reboot your computer. Others modify many critical components of a computer operating system and incomplete removal often renders the computer inoperable.


How to keep spyware off of my computer?

Here are few useful tips on how to avoid spyware infection:

* Use anti-spyware programs such as Spyware Terminator.
* Keep your anti-spyware programs current by downloading updates.
* If using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, turn off its ability to run scripts without your permission.
* Prevent spyware from transmitting data off the system by using a firewall.
* Do not click on links within pop-ups. By clicking on a pop-up link you may install spyware on your computer. Close the popup with the "X" on the title bar, do not use the "close" link, if there are any available within the window.
* Do not download programs from websites you are not familiar with.
* Be careful of unexpected dialog boxes asking whether you want to perform an action. If you are not sure about the impact of the action, better click "NO" or close the dialog box by clicking the "X" icon in the title bar.
* Do not follow email links offering anti-spyware software. These links may actually install the spyware they claim to be keeping off your system.


Is there any legal protection against spyware?

Although the Can-Spam law that has been in effect for a year, it hasn't had much success against unsolicited email. Legal experts and business technology professionals remain hopeful that laws aimed at reducing adware and spyware will fare somewhat better.

States are moving forward in crafting anti-spyware legislation. A former Governor of Utah signed into law the Spyware Control Act that bans the installation of spyware without the user's consent. A similar law went into effect in California enforcing a $1,000 penalty per violation. At the 109th Congress recently convened Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif., reintroduced her anti-spyware bill that includes civil fines up to $3 million for violators.

Still, Michael Overly, a technology attorney with the law firm of Foley & Lardner, says that the new laws aren't entirely necessary because the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act already makes it illegal for unauthorized system intrusions. Other legal experts point out that Title 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act enables the FTC to track down anyone conducting deceptive trade practices, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act also could be used against those who send out spyware.

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