Antivirus Softwares: Get One for Your Own Sake
Why Buy Antivirus Software?
An unprotected computer is a vulnerable computer, plain and simple. Every year there are hundreds of viruses, Trojans, worms and other malware, released into cyberspace designed to harm your computer. Most people don’t realize that malware is everywhere and avoiding a malicious computer invader is very difficult. And usually, you won’t even know you’ve become a victim.
Malware is an umbrella term for all malicious software. The most common are viruses and spyware. There are many different types of viruses floating through the Internet. Consider yourself lucky if you have never been the victim of a virus. There are a number of talented programmers out there with a lot of time on their hands writing software programs intended to harm your computer or your reputation.
If you have ever come back to your computer and found it won’t start or all your files erased and unrecoverable, you know exactly why you need to protect your computer. A typical virus will essentially wipe out the master boot record (MBR) of your computer, making it completely unusable. In some cases, the only thing left to do is to reformat your hard drive and reinstall your operating system losing all your pictures of the kids, work-related spreadsheets, email and more. The best Antivirus programs will stop viruses before they ever reach your hard drive and keep your computer safe, usually without you even noticing.
A recent study found that more than 80% of home computers have spyware installed on them and the users don’t even know it. Sypware, or sometimes called adware, is a small, seemingly innocent piece of software that embeds itself in your Internet browser.As you surf the internet, signing into email, social networks or bank accounts, the spyware program reports back to home base with all your personal information. Before long, your resources are drained, your computer slows down, and some stranger knows everything about you.
Rootkits are also a type of spyware. In this case, a hacker takes control of your computer, without you knowing, and uses your hard drive and IP address to infect others. This type spyware is difficult to detect on your own, but top antivirus software will detect a dangerous download and immediately delete the file.
Computers are expensive pieces of equipment. For the same reasons you lock your home and car (to keep others out), you need to have some type of antivirus protection on your computer. There is an arms race out there between malware producers and antivirus software producers. And it escalates daily. Remaining unprotected is a sure-fire way to become collateral damage in this war. The cost to prevent and protect yourself is much lower than the cost of replacing your computer and restoring your identity.
On this site, you’ll find a side-by-side comparison of antivirus software products, Learning Center articles on computer virus topics, news stories and comprehensive antivirus software reviews that will help you make an informed decision on which antivirus program is right for you.
What to Look for in Antivirus Software
All antivirus software is not created equal. Like any other category of consumer goods, it has its good, its bad and its mediocre. The choices are broad and wide. Software offerings from around the globe grace the reviews of antivirus software at TopTenReviews, but in your efforts to decide which best antivirus software to buy, remember that it really comes down to just two factors: user-friendliness and effectiveness.
Top antivirus software should be easy enough for a computer user to both install and install. The software should effectively seek out and identify virus threats, as well as clean or isolate infected files. There should be understandable reporting available for each scan and plenty of help support available, so you can be well-informed of the software’s activities and capabilities. Below are the criteria TopTenREVIEWS uses to evaluate antivirus software.
- Ease of Use – Exceptional antivirus software is simple to use, regardless of a user’s computer experience or knowledge of viruses. The software should be easy to install and configure. If you need to use the interface to change settings, it should be intuitive and non-threatening to beginners. Ideally, most features will be enable/disable toggles with the power to fine-tune if desired. The best antivirus software is the kind you simply install on your system and then let it do its work.
- Effective at Identifying Viruses and Worms – The best antivirus products identify infected files quickly through realtime scanning, searching for viruses in a multitude of sources, including email, instant message applications, web browsing, etc. Scanning speed is also important. Slow antivirus software will tend to interfere with your work or gaming, and if it’s very slow or you are particularly impatient, you might have the tendency to stop or pause the scan, rendering the software useless. Generally, antivirus software scans your hard drive and files looking for known viruses.
- Effective at Cleaning or Isolating Infected Files – Truly capable antivirus software thoroughly cleans, deletes or quarantines infected files, keeping them from spreading throughout the hard drive or network. Proactive/heuristic testing enables the antivirus software to detect and quarantine code that looks and acts like a virus even before it has been reported. This could be critical in protecting you on a “Day Zero” attack and spare you from being one of the first casualties.
- Activity Reporting – Antivirus programs should give immediate notification of viruses found by realtime scanners and should provide an easy to read report of scan results, including what was found and what was done with infected files.
- Feature Set – A well-rounded feature set allows antivirus software to provide absolute protection. The best programs are those that offer a wide variety of tools, from basic realtime scanning to more advanced heuristic scanning and script blocking. When it comes to virus protection, the more options the better. Many of the best antivirus packages now include multiple protection schemes at no extra cost. These include antispyware, antimalware, rootkit detection, parental controls and email screening, as many of the new threats are not literally viruses, but rather a variety of malware.
- Ease of Installation and Setup – Antivirus programs should be a breeze to install, making it easy to go from installation to initial scan in just a couple clicks of the mouse.
- Help Documentation – High-end antivirus software comes with plenty of help, including support via email, online chat or via telephone. There should also be online resources, such as knowledge bases and FAQs available for quick and convenient help.
If you would like more background on computer viruses, we encourage you to read these popular articles:
- Worm or Virus…What’s the Difference?
- Understanding Viruses
- Viruses: Faster and More Complex Than Ever
No matter how serious a computer virus is or how quickly it’s passed around, with today’s antivirus software, you’ll always have a cure. To view our top choice, read our BitDefender Antivirus review and find out why we think it’s the best antivirus software on the market.
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Check this link for a comprehensive review of the latest and best AV software
Health department warns of E. coli contamination
Agency says Aunt Mid’s iceberg lettuce should be avoided
September 29, 2008
Restaurants and institutions should not buy iceberg lettuce distributed by Aunt Mid’s Produce Co. after the produce was linked to more than 30 Illinois cases of E. coli, the Illinois Department of Public Health warned Sunday.
No Aunt Mid’s lettuce should be used until further notice.
Aunt Mid’s has voluntarily suspended the processing and sale of iceberg lettuce throughout the United States, according to the department.
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Writer’s note: As a food technology student, I myself know the potential lethality of the bacterium. Hence, I warn you people. Be wary of what you eat…or it maybe your last.
Apple Selling Unlocked iPhone 3G in Hong Kong
Apple has made an unlocked version of the iPhone 3G available in Hong Kong, letting consumers pick whichever carrier they so choose.
This is in sharp contrast to Apple’s policy for the almost everywhere else on the planet. Unlocked iPhones are rampant worldwide, but that isn’t something that Apple has sanctioned.
Freedom doesn’t come cheap. The 8GB version is available for about $695 (5,400 Hong Kong dollars), while the 16GB iPhone costs about $798 (6,200 HK dollars), according to Apple’s site.
The “iPhone 3G purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier,” the site states. “Simply insert the SIM from your current phone into iPhone 3G and connect to iTunes 8 to complete activation.”
Energy Drinks? You’d Better Avoid Them, Study Says
Have you wondered how many people consume energy drinks on a daily basis, or even more often? Or what happens if you combine them with alcohol? Well, we must tell you there isn’t good news; and warn you to be careful.
At first, these high-caffeine drinks were consumed by all gaming elite to ensure their speed is high and reflexes are sharp in extended play, because the drinks were promoted as performance enhancers. However, they soon gained popularity so that an incredible number of people, not only gamers, consume them. It seems that United States citizens alone spent approximately 5.4 billion U.S. dollars on energy drinks in 2006, a figure growing about 47 percent per year, a report said.
According to the findings of a new study published in the Sept. 20 issue of the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, the super-caffeinated energy drinks can trigger caffeine intoxication. “The caffeine content of energy drinks varies over a 10-fold range, with some containing the equivalent of 14 cans of Coca-Cola, yet the caffeine amounts are unlabeled and few include warnings about potential health risks of caffeine intoxication,” said one of the authors of the study, Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.
Caffeine intoxication is clinically considered a syndrome. It is currently defined by a number of symptoms and clinical features that surface in response to recent excessive consumption of caffeine. Common features of caffeine intoxication include excitement, anxiety, rapid heartbeat, restlessness, tremors, insomnia, rambling flow of thought and speech or periods of inexhaustibility. In rare cases, caffeine intoxication can lead to death.
One death apparently linked to the intake of a popular energy drink, Red Bull, made the headlines in 2000, when Irish athlete Ross Cooney, 18, died of sudden adult death syndrome hours after drinking four cans of the drink. Following the occurrence, France prohibited the energy drink, but it removed the ban only days after. However, in countries such as Norway, Uruguay and Denmark, it remains banned.
Since a lot of energy drinks are marketed as “dietary supplements” that increase energy and physical performance, the limit the FDA requires on the caffeine amount found in energy drinks isn’t valid. Caffeinated energy drinks are a growing concern because they guarantee super alertness. Still, they carry with 10 times or even more the caffeine content of soft drinks.
The team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University who carried out the study said that manufacturers should note on caffeinated energy drinks’ labels the caffeine doses the products carry, and to caution on presumptive risks they pose to consumers.
The caffeine content of energy drinks can vary from can to can, from 50 milligrams to more than 500 milligrams per serving, whereas a normal 12-ounce cola drink has approximately 35 mg of caffeine per serving and a 6-ounce cup of brewed coffee has 80 to 150 milligrams of the stimulant drug per serving.
On the word of one drink-company manufacturer, the energy drinks can be a harmless substitute to drug abuse for youngsters. “We say, ‘Do the drink, not the drug,”’ stated Raymond Herrera, Partner and world wide marketing director of Redux Beverages. “You do the drug you are dumb. If you do the drink you are cool.”
The Johns Hopkins researchers also said that caffeinated drinks can cause abuse of prescription stimulant drugs like Ritalin.
UCLA group discovers humongous prime number
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13 million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize.
The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm.
“We’re delighted,” said UCLA’s Edson Smith, the leader of the effort. “Now we’re looking for the next one, despite the odds.”
It’s the eighth Mersenne prime discovered at UCLA.
Primes are numbers like three, seven and 11 that are divisible by only two whole positive numbers: themselves and one.
Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of “P” minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609.
Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a cooperative system in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes.
The $100,000 prize is being offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for finding the first Mersenne prime with more than 10 million digits. The foundation supports individual rights on the Internet and set up the prime number prize to promote cooperative computing using the Web.
The prize could be awarded when the new prime is published, probably next year.
DJ AM Leaves Hospital
Adam Goldstein, who is also known as DJ AM, was released from a hospital in Augusta, Ga., a spokeswoman said Friday. Mr. Goldstein suffered severe burns in a plane crash a week ago in which Travis Barker, the former drummer for the band Blink-182, was also injured. Two pilots and two other passengers were killed. Their Learjet crashed on takeoff from a Columbia airport on Sept. 19. Both men are expected to recover fully.
Politics, Palin and ‘SNL’
A lot of politics on this week’s “SNL,” and couple of alumni, too: Tina Fey reprised her role as Sarah Palin, Chris Parnell turned up as Jim Lehrer in a mock-debate sketch, and the news contained its fair share of political jokes, none of which I can remember nearly 24 hours later.
While Fey’s impression of Palin remains pitch-perfect, her sketch — a nearly point-for-point parody of Katie Couric’s interview with Palin, co-starring Amy Poehler as a perplexed and irritated Couric — wasn’t as jaw-droppingly funny as the the one two weeks ago. The novelty has worn off a bit, but I think the bigger problem is that the original CBS interviewwas such an incredible TV artifact that it required no further elaboration. (In fact, as Andrew Sullivan points out, some of the sketch was transcribed directly from the interview.)
As for the debate sketch, it was OK, and notable for the fact that the “SNL” writers are clearly trying to stick it to Obama as much as they are to McCain. But again, unlike last spring’s first Clinton-Obama debate sketch, in which one of the moderators asked Obama if he’d like a pillow, I doubt this one is going to change the national conversation. Still, I think I’m being a little harsh. I’m sure these sketches are incredibly hard to pull off, great or merely good, in just over 24 hours. The source material wasn’t ripe for parody, aside from Lehrer’s desperate attempts to get the two candidates to address one another. Plus, it’s always nice to see Parnell. I’m looking forward to more time with Dr. Spaceman on “30 Rock.”
Google wants people to REALLY use the ANDROID
Google’s Rich Miner has identified one of the biggest problems facing mobile phone carriers, manufacturers, and developers: The hardware on the current generation of phones is not being used by many customers.
G1 phoneMiner, Google’s group manager of mobile platforms, made the observation at the Future of Mobile panel at Emerging Technology ‘08.
“Hardware on mobile phones has been outpacing the software capabilities,” Miner declared, noting that 80% of mobile phones being sold today have cameras on them, yet the number of people who actually know how to use them or get the images off the phone is between 10 and 50%, depending on the model. “The capabilities on these devices are not being leveraged by people,” Miner added. He blamed small screens, bad UIs, and closed systems for the current state of affairs.
The trend has huge implications for Google and its Android partners, including T-Mobile and HTC, whose G1 phone will be released to the public next month. However, Miner seemed confident that Android would prevail, thanks in large part to software improvements, the presence of a true Web browsing experience, and Google’s open development platform. “These are factors which are helping to realize the mobile Internet, which has eluded us,” he said.
A dugong’s letter to the world
jirehprovider’s blog about dugongs!
To the humans of this planet,
Hello earthlings. I am Mira, a young female of one of the warm-blooded mammals of the sea known as dugongs. I live in the shallows of the Philippine Sea. The manatees, who are our dear cousins, share the same lifestyle and story.
My kind is known as sea cows because we graze on sea grass in the shallows of warm coastal waters, just as the land animals, which humans call cows, graze on land grass. We are herbivores. We are completely aquatic and can live in both salt water and fresh water. There are still some dugong families that have still been grazing in the waters of the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Pacific Ocean, southeast coast of Africa, western coast ofMadagascar,Papua New-Guinea, Thailand, Indonesia, Shark Bay, south of the Australian waters, north of Japan, and the Philippine Sea, but sadly, only in a few numbers.
Us dugongs and our relatives have two stubby flipper-like front legs used for both for swimming and for “walking” on the bottom of the shallows when grazing, a powerful tail, and no hind legs at all. We have thick skin that is almost hairless, blubber to keep ourselves warm, and a few bristles around our snout to help find and identify food. We move gracefully but not so fast for we can only travel at the maximum speed of 10 km per hour. Dugongs can grow up to 15 feet long and weight up to 1600 kilograms. The males grow tusks. Since we are mammals, we come up to the surface for a breathe of air every fifteen minutes when our lungs are fully inflated. Dugongs multiply very slowly because the females can only give birth to one calf after 13 months of pregnancy and can only have another calf after 3 years. The calves start munching of solid food at 4 months old. It takes 10 long years for a female dugong to become a mother. A dugongs life span is very close to the human life span. We live up to 70 years of age.
When our kind was first sighted by humans (European sailors) more than 400 years ago they were thought to be the legendary mermaids of the sea, half human and half fish, when we were just mothers floating on their backs with their calf cradled between their flippers to suckle. That was the beginning of the sea cow slaughter. All around the world we were being hunted mainly for out meat, skin, oil, blubber, and the tusks of the adult males. In some places, Indonesia, we were for our tears which were made to made into good-luck charms. We are easy to catch because we can be found in the shallows and can dive no deeper than 24 feet. I still remember the horrifying true stories my mother told me when I was younger as a warning. There are already reserves for dugongs and other endangered species but more are needed. Though there are already human laws that forbid sea cow hunting, there are some that illegally kill us for their greed of money because we fetch a high price. Already, a bigger relative of ours, the Steller’s sea cow, were killed to their extinction within the 30 years since they were first seen by humaneyes. They used to be found in the artic waters around the Bering Sea, Alaska, over 200 years ago. They were a lot more bigger than dugongs.They could grow up to 25 feet long, 22 feet around, and they weighed up to 8800 pounds.
Even if most of our deaths are caused by intensional murders, other doings that humans do destroy us. Simply throwing something like plastic or metal into the sea may be the cause ofthe death of a dugong because that dugong swallowed what you threw and choked. A simple fishnet left in the sea may be tangled around a dugong who wouldn’t be able to move his flippers and drown because he wasn’t able to come up to the surface for air. Simple joy ride on a motor boat may be the cause of the severe cuts on the side of a dugong. To some humans, simply getting rid of their trash by throwing it into river won’t do anything really very bad, but I tell you it will because a river will always find its way to the sea and then…? See? Simple things that you humans do causes death and injury to us dugongs. Other things that humans do that also hurt us are big like oil spills, dynamite fishing, development of more buildings and factories
near the shore.
Our kind used to swim freely in herd of thousands in the oceans and seas once upon a time, but now… we live in a life of nightmares and danger zones. I ask you, how would it feel to be a child whose mother was slaughtered? or a mother whose child was killed? Very painful. We dugongs have feelings just like many other animals and we can’t endure the pain of losing a love one any longer.
I tell these facts and history on the behalf of the less than a couple of thousand dugongs left in the world. Humans are the cause of adding our specie to the “endangered list” and it’s up to the humans still to save us. I only hope to live to see dugongs swim in herds of thousands again.
Hoping for a great change,
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please help mother nature! we all need each other to survive 
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