As many of you know, Viruses on Windows based computers can be a real pain. Let’s be entirely honest here and clear up a few generalizations and rumors about viruses…
Myth 1: Macs don’t have viruses.
While it’s far less frequent, Macs have plenty of Malware and Viruses out there that can drastically decrease the security of your data. But FARRRR less exist when compared to Windows. They make antivirus applications for Macintosh and there are definition files of Mac exclusive and shared viruses that effect it. Linux/Unix are no exception to this rule either. Let me explain to you why there is a difference though.
If you look at the statistics on how many people use which operating system type, it become very obvious that the WORLD is full of Windows users. Advertising can tell you that there are a lot of Mac users, but when compared it is nowhere close. The average person uses Windows and people who design Viruses and Malware target as many people as possible, in doing so, design their software to effect Windows users. It’s unfortunate, but that is the truth. Apple loves to tell people that they are somehow immune to any types of attacks and tout their own horns quite often, publicly, stating just that. They pretend that their software has something to do with it which is bogus and they are not nearly as perfect as they would like to say they are. If everyone used Macs, they would get more Viruses.
Myth 2: Macs are more secure.
What they also don’t tell you is this: Networking is Networking.
There is nothing about a Macintosh computer that makes their Networking components more secure than a Windows PC. They go online, people can connect to them on many of the same ports through the same networks through the same means as any other machine. The software on them is only a small part of that. In order to access web pages and emails you must connect to the web and email servers on a certain port. Connecting opens you up to possibilities for attack or at the very least, theft of your data. When your computer, regardless of which type it is, transmits data, people connected to your network can capture it and steal that information. Network security comes first, PC/Mac security comes second.
Myth 3: Paying for Anti-virus software keeps your data safe.
While that CAN be true to some extent, the most common way that your computer becomes infected, data becomes stolen, or something gets installed on your computer without your consent is through your Web Browser. It may be shocking to some of you, but still, and by a large margin, Internet Explorer is the most used Web Browser. Since it comes with nearly every PC sold, people just use it by default, not because it is in any way a superior product. It does a TERRIBLE job of displaying websites compared to any modern Web Browser. In my opinion, it’s by far the worst.
Internet Explorer, regardless of which version, is attached to your computer and putting your computer at risk! Whenever something effects it, it effects Windows Explorer and often causes any program your PC uses to shut down. A web browser like Mozilla Firefox has it’s own security built right into it, including: virus scan of any downloaded file, popup blockers, website certificate verification, plugin control security, and even an updated list of websites that are potentially harmful to your computer. And if all of that fails and Firefox somehow gets damaged or corrupted, it’s not going to effect the rest of your computer because it is it’s own, separate application.
If you’re still not convinced, it’s FASTER, uses less system resources, more functional, easier to use, imports all of your old Internet Explorer settings for you, has more support for multimedia and advanced websites, and 99.9% of the time, will display a web page correctly where Internet Explorer fails to do so.
Myth 4: Well known antivirus software such as Symantec, McAffee, and Norton are the best.
For one, I’ve never believed that to be true. NEVER. I remember back when I first got started using computers online. It seemed that every school computer I got on with Norton installed was painfully slow and if anyone ever had it installed and wanted to remove it, they had better have lot’s of spare time because it was undoubtedly broken immediately after the install. That’s true with all of the top 3 Anti-Virus companies. Their software consumes more resources than any others, breaks too easily, takes forever to update, and what people aren’t aware of, FAIL at keeping your computer secure. Nowadays computers are much faster, but instead of getting better, this type of software keeps getting worse as they add in more “protection” from malware and ways to predict future threats.
The fact of the matter is this: I’ve used every major antivirus application I could think of and downloaded viruses onto my laptop(Yes, they are easy to find). Out of the 25 different infected files, McAfee, Symantec(yes an up to date SEP client), and Norton did extremely bad. The only antivirus program to prove completely ineffective was ClamWin, but nobody really takes that seriously anyways, and for a reason obviously, it found NOTHING. But each of those top 3 programs found less than 10 of the threats. ALL of them did however prove to be the biggest pain to work with, the most expensive, and the biggest cause of painfully slow computing out there.
Kaspersky found the most viruses actively, all 25, without doing a scan. Avira Antivir took a bit longer to do so, but found 23 of them without a scan, and all 25 when I did a scan. The version of Avira Antivir however was COMPLETELY FREE OF COST. Antivir is incredible and I suggest everyone download and use it immediately.
http://www.free-av.de/en/trialpay_download/1/avira_antivir_personal__free_antivirus.html
First and foremost, Ive had to resubmit this like 10 times! Finally I figured out why it wouldnt let me submit this, your SQL server has problems with me typing apostrophes, which is basically the mood for the rest of what Im writing.
Im the one because I started off liking Vista and even promoted it for a while. I was so excited about it that I ran out and bought Vista 64 Ultimate edition right as it became available and even decorated my room with one of the "The "Wow starts now" displays that I got from the local PC Club. I beta tested Vista, said contrary things to all of the people who doubted Vista and said how much it was annoying and bulky and slow. Im using Vista right now while Im writing this to you, and I feel like I was probably the most let down person there is. I was so excited and so hopeful for a good experience that I blinded myself with what a pain Vista actually is for me. Starting with the 64-bit install disc NOT SUPPORTING more than 2gb of RAM at install. And not notifying you as to why, just blue screening until I figured out my amount of RAM was the problem. Thats a strange situation for a 64-bit OS. The second, and real reason why I AM THE ONE who deserves a new Windows 7 laptop is that MICROSOFT HAS LIED TO ME! And so has the salesman at PC Club. I had practically no money when I went to buy Vista, but I spent everything I had on the Ultimate Edition because of the salesman AND Microsofts promise to release new ultimate only updates. Where are they? What did I actually pay extra for? I dont really understand why I paid extra at all, and yes, it was a HUGE price difference over Home Premium. And dont tell me I get to use dreamscene, because that is a NEGATIVE feature in my opinion. Sure it looks good, at lower resolutions, but it also slows down your computer. Ive tried Windows 7, and I will admit, a lot of the problems with Windows Vista are gone. But I dont want to buy it. I feel like Microsoft honestly owes me a free upgrade for lying to me about giving me exclusive updates and features when there sure werent any. I know most peoples ideas for writing to you are probably optimistic and full of suck-up remarks about what good things they would do with it. Really, Im just an average guy who spends all day every day glued to a computer, and after buying Vista, and using it for soooo long, I feel like Ive earned this.
Thanks for reading this.
Today Google officially released its newest Open-Source web browser for beta testing.
What is it?
Open source (modern) web browser currently available for windows as Beta.
What is it supposed to do?
One box for everything
New Tab Page
Application Shortcuts
Dynamic Tabs
Crash Control
Incognito Mode
Safe browsing
Instant Bookmarks
Importing Settings
Simpler Downloads
Where can I get it?
http://www.google.com/chrome
What’s the install like?
First a small exe that opens to a download while installing method. Very straight forward and smooth.
Review:
First glance: It is extremely clean. No options pull downs above the address bar means tabs go right at the top so there is no fight for screen real estate when viewing pages. But there isn’t an option to go entirely full screen, which will be missed by those people who like to showcase their work for clients without any browser clutter. Also lots of very cool “ajax style” animations for everything Chrome does like downloading things.
If you look in the address bar, Chrome does a very neat thing with your URL, breaking it down in contrast from black and light grey so you can tell what the actual domain is seperate from your paths.
For example: http://www.johnux.com becomes http://johnux.com/
First page I attempt visiting: gameinthemaking.com | That is exactly how I typed it in. The htaccess file for that site forces auto www. for all pages in order to keep search engine data consistent. So in a modern browser(not IE) the url will change to http://www.gameinthemaking.com without any issues allowing me to visit my site. Internet Explorer does a search for the term “gameinthemaking.com” instead of sending me to my site. That’s okay because I among countless other people are trying to wean people off of IE altogether. Google Chrome handles this type of url request just as poorly as IE does in my opinion. Chrome takes the url, adds http://www. to it, and deletes the .com and sends you to this page.
Now click to the page chrome KNOWS you meant to go to! This honestly bugs me. Sure the htaccess file on that site is probably not perfect, but Firefox, Safari, and Opera don’t seem to mind. There might be some reason I don’t know about that explains why it does this, but I’m going to compare it’s actions to the 3 most respected browsers out there and voice my complaint.
Similar to Opera, but kind of smart, and kind of silly: Google Chrome seems to be really building up their Tabbing ability and new tab layout quite a bit. It’s similar to Opera where you have lots of little previews available to you on your new tab, but instead of being your choice of previews, it’s your history and most visited sites. Take what you want from it, but I personally don’t enjoy what comes up:
History like this can be cool sometimes, but what if you don’t want your history displayed? I have a friend coming over who is having a birthday this week. For a half prank/half serious gift I was thinking about getting him an Easy Bake Oven. If he comes over he just might need to go on the web and what would he find? Right off the bat, easy bake ovens under my recent bookmarks and my Most visited pages.
This is where Incognito mode comes in. – Incognito mode can be selected from the option panel by going to the menu and choosing, open Incognito window. This allows for completely clean browsing that leaves no traces of your page visits in Chrome. VERY COOL!
Plugins: ? 3rd party content? Alexa?….: Not yet. I know this is sad, but what else can we say, it’s brand new and I honestly don’t know what Google plans to do about this, but at current I’ll live.
Performance: This is where Google Chrome really excels. By default it seems to have fully working support for flash player which is always nice. The problem with flash being closed source is every plugin for every browser has it’s own quirks that take some getting used to. With Safari I often have trouble getting all kinds of multimedia to work properly unless it’s Quicktime, so I’m not even going to go there. Internet Explorer has tendancies to throw page content over my flash so I can’t view pages as the designers intended. Firefox likes to work a lot, until you have multiple tabs or pages open that all have flash on them, then we have issues not being able to playback more than a few seconds of flash video without manually scrolling ahead a few seconds.
So here is my test. I’m going to keep google Chrome open all day. 10 of them. Each with 10 tabs. All displaying flash on all tabs either video or just animated content. I’m doing this on my laptop(2ghz, 2gb ram XP), and my Desktop(3.6ghz quad-core, 4gb ram, Vista 64) I will attempt to see if there are ever any issues with the flash or content not displaying properly.
What will I use to monitor this?
How about we try the built-in task manager?
And for a more enhanced view? The Stats for nerds option in the bottom left hand corner.
Google Chrome comes with some VERY awesome performance monitoring tools available through it’s task manager that allow you to close things that are using too many resources, monitor pages individually and close them if you need to. THIS IS AMAZING!
You know what? I’m sold, download and install it today. I haven’t got it to crash yet and I’ve been trying fairly hard, watch for an update soon.
I give it a 9.2 out of 10.
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