Category: Cool Sites/BLOGs

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The Virus Wars

Read this unusually detailed story at PC Magazine online.

Among other things, this article covers the human engineering factors in virus writing, the state-of-the-art in combating viruses by antivirus software companies, and the real scenarios we are likely to see in the future. The article is very infomative, and includes input from a several different virus writers.

On a related note, The Wilcox Family Says Goodbye to Internet Explorer: Mozilla has become our default browser for the time being, as I am waiting for some very scary Browser Helper Object vulnerabilities (and other exploits) to be repaired in IE. I’ve had one virus make it past Norton Antivirus in the form of a BHO (it was caught in my nightly scan, and did no damage), and my team leader, who is tech-saavy enough to write his own viruses and extremely security-conscious was nailed with two separate BHO infections in the course of a week. So, for the time being, we default to ’Zilla, and only fire up IE for a few sites (like the Sohmer Family BLOG that won’t display or work correctly in Mozilla.

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Happy New Year and Moving Madness

Here, Naomi shows off one of her Christmas presents, and her destiny (Nichelle is too busy getting ready for our move to read this), with a “Geek in Training” t-shirt from ThinkGeek.com. She also received the TCP/IP creeper, but won’t fit into it for several months.

Back at the Wilcox family, we are moving in one week, and packing in earnest. Thanks to Nichelle’s extremely hard work and planning, it looks like everything is going to go smoothly.

Our new address as of January 9 will be:

329 Nowell Street
Nashua, NH 03060-4453

Phone: 603-886-5225

I should also mention that my friend Mark Sohmer has finally taken my advice and started a BLOG of his own at http://blog.sohmer.net/. Of course, since he is using Bryan Harrington’s code, later modified by me, guess who gets pestered with questions?

I’d like to BLOG some reflections on the past year, but am too busy at the moment.

In more recent events, Christmas was excellent, and despite being sad, Dad’s funeral was really wonderful. I will defiitely write more about that later.