It's the new year and with it comes time for new changes, which reminds me of a funny thing that happened to me recently. I was working on a list of my New Year's Resolutions and I was thinking my porn collection was starting to get stale. That kind of thing happens when you aren't really getting any sex action and you use the same visual stimulation over and over to facilitate the spanking of the monkey.

So anyway with new year and the want of new porn but no cash to buy porn, I thought I'd hop over to my file-sharing tool of choice Limewire to see what I could download from the friendly file-sharing citizens of the internet whilst typing away at my entry. I tell ya, the quality of freely shared porn nowadays has severely plummeted. The must be dozens and dozens of "license protected" porn clips for every one clean, license-free porn clip.

Now if the license protection were to serve it's intended purpose, which is to prevent bootleg copying and downloading of pornography then maybe I wouldn't mind so much, I'd be frustrated, but I wouldn't mind. What pisses me off completely is that the "licenses" to the vast majority of these porn clips contain either redirects to "pay-for-porn" sites or worse, they contain utterly nasty Trojan downloader virus programs that "hijack" your web browser, usually Internet Explorer or "Internet Exploder" as the more tech savvy refer to it, and download a bunch of nasty malware, trojans, spyware and those dumbass IE "toolbars" that you can't get rid of without a severe registry cleaning.

Yeah, yeah I should have known better, but my want of free porn overcame my better judgment. Luckily I had antivirus software in place and 2 different brands of spyware removal but there are still some lingering Trojans present on my system that I'm going to have to get medieval on.

The moral of this story is to never ever accept a "popup" asking you to download software from a browser unless it is from a company you trust. If it is from a company you never heard of or if you ever have even an ounce of doubt, don't download it. I did and my machine got ass-raped hundreds of different ways, with not even spit for lube and was not even offered an after-screw cigarette. My Internet Exploder browser now has not one but two "extra" toolbars that I'm probably going to have to surgically remove because they are buried so far up the IE browser's anal cavity.

Because I don't want this to happen to anyone else, being a concerned internet citizen and all I'd like to hand out some free tips. First, if you have any of this so-called porn on your hard drive, the kind that asks you to load a "license" and you have files that are being shared, delete that crap from your hard drive. All it's doing is taking up hard drive space and you will help the assfucks who made these Trojans spread their disease.

Check 'yo-self be-fo' U wreck yo' self, Coz big Ds in yo' mouth is bad fo' yo' health... - Ice Cube

Anyway while I'm dishing out free advice, I might as well make a checklist:

Checklist for Safe Computing

1. Have your firewall activated. A firewall is basically a protective boundary that restricts access to certain network ports from outside of your computer, especially over the internet. Kind of like a condom for your computer's penis, if it had one that is... If you running Windows XP, it has a built in firewall and if you have XP Service Pack 2 it is activated by default. If you don't have SP2, Microsoft has a decent tutorial here on how to set it up on your PC. If you are running another operating system, you may have to purchase one from a third-party.



2. Keep your Windows Updates as current as possible through http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/. If you have an official licensed copy you should be up to XP Service Pack 2. If you "borrowed" a copy from your friend or family member you won't be able to update to SP2 so get yourself a licensed copy but, for the meanwhile, try to download every other security and critical update possible.



3. Have an antivirus software program loaded on your system and make sure the virus definitions are frequently updated and you scan your system frequently. If the Antivirus software that came with your PC expired or if you never got around to loading it, go to http://grisoft.com/. Grisoft offers a Free Edition of AVG Antivirus. The AVG Professional version, which you have to buy has more features, but if you are in a financial pinch, you can't really beat the Grisoft AVG Free edition because it's software AND virus definition updates are free.



4. Have spyware protection and removal programs loaded. Personally I reccomend the latest versions of both SpyBot Search and Destroy and Ad-Aware. Both programs can be found from the vendors themselves or in http://www.download.com/. SpyBot is freeware, but donations are encouraged for the development of the software. AdAware has a free version as well that is upgradeable with better functionality if you buy a license. If you run both programs separately one will be able to catch spyware programs that the other one missed and vice-versa. Spybot also has added functionality that you can set to block bad pages and lets you lock down your IE settings to prevent pages from being "hijacked" by Trojan/Virus programs.



5. Consider using an alternate web browser. Internet Exploder is the most popular web browser and for good reason. Microsoft has integrated IE with Windows, so if you are running Windows, chances are you are also using IE and so is about 99% of the people who surf the web. The good part is that web pages with all the flashy and pretty designs are coded to show in IE. The bad part is that Trojans, Viruses, Malware and Spyware are also designed to attack and exploit IE because it is so ubiquitous.
   
   It is therefore a smart idea to use an alternate web browser. The most popular alternatives seem to be Netscape Navigator, Opera and Mozilla Firefox. If you have space on you hard drive you can load all of them and see which one you like the best. You can even keep IE on your computer, just make sure one of the alternate browsers are set as a default. If space is a premium, Mozilla Firefox seems to be the most popular alternate web browser thanks to it's simplified but capable features, which reminds me, I need to change the layout of this diary to make it more Firefox friendly. Sorry about that.

There's probably more things you can do like not download "free" porn and clicking to install non-trusted software, but I just cant think of anything else right now so I'll just leave it at that and post up my New Year's Resolutions in another entry...