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Articles by PJ Blue mostly about computers, security and SEO

  • Looking Back From 2057 Well, its been an exciting century for me starting with the launch of the Russian satellite, Sputnik in 1957 and ending with the first space elevator on my 100th birthday in 2057. Its also been a sad and depressing time too with various wars and conflicts over oil and minerals but it all worked out for us all in the end. The really frustrating thing is we could have done much of this years ago and saved our selves so much grief, but we didn't partly because we didn't know how, but mostly because of greed, self-interest and an astonishing lack of vision.

  • Windows, The disposable operating system I guess most of us have know this for many years but now even the creators of Windows have admitted it - Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible "When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit," Said Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft.

  • Riding the second dot.com wave It was in the early months of 2000 that it all seemed to end, The dot-com boom was over, billions of £££s were lost. You might be tempted to think that the Internet was now a deserted wasteland and the human race had moved on to the next big thing. A quick look at Google's web site reveals that it currently indexes some 8 billion web pages ! That's quite a leap from the 4 billion pages it was indexing a couple of years ago. The Internet is far from a deserted wasteland, its thriving and getting bigger by the day.

  • How to get less spam No one is quite sure when the first 'spam' message was sent, some think it was in 1994 when two lawyers hired a programmer to post an advert to every newsgroup on USENET. As the same message was repeated across many newsgroups it got labelled 'spam' after the Monty Python sketch where every meal served in a cafeteria has some degree of spam in it. Many years later, its more than just a nuisance, its now doing serious financial harm to many people and companies with viruses, spyware and identity stealing programs like key-loggers. This articles describes how you are getting all this unwanted mail, how to reduce the amount and with a bit of planning, how to drop-off the 'spammers' radar all together.

  • Who cares about computer viruses !! "Who cares !!" said my friend, "If it slows my PC down a bit, I can live with that. I'm NOT paying some PC nerd £50 / hour to remove these virus things every month !!", he continued. We were chatting in my local the other day about computer security. There had been numerous reports of viruses, worms, spyware and other malware (Malicious Software) on the news, in fact there have been reports of these almost every week now. It has gotten so bad that a US Government agency (US-CERT) has advised against the use of Internet Explorer (IE)

  • More Hits You have just spent many weeks developing your web site, you have uploaded it to your web server, submitted it to a few search engines and you wait. Weeks go by with hardly a response, what's gone wrong? The answer is disturbingly simple - it's been lost in a sea of millions of other web sites. This document describes various methods to increase your web site's visibility on the Internet with minimal cost. The methods described here are being used by us on all of our Internet projects including RareList and British Women Artists

  • Microsoft: Caught between a Rock and a hard thing I have seen many articles predicting their demise, but I think it's unlikely that Microsoft will ever go bust, but I do think they are in for a very hard time because there are so many huge forces being applied to them in both directions. Before anyone asks, I don't hate Microsoft but I have been caught in the fallout from their buggy, insecure software on too many occasions. Luckily for me I saw what was coming and was able to jump ship before any real damage was done. In some ways I feel sad, Windows has earned me a fair bit of cash over the years but it has become a liability now - I'm tired of having to come up with endless excuses as to why Windows crashed or has become infected yet again.

  • Microsoft and the common man "That really p*sses me off !!" said my friend, "I really hate it when people slag-off Microsoft, they have bought computing to the common man", he added, taking a swig from his pint "I can just plug in a CD Writer and install the software without having to call you lot in !!". He had a point. We had been discussing the merits of Open-source software like Linux versus Windows and he seemed to be winning the argument. "Those other companies are just jealous of Microsoft's success, if those other software companies were any good, why haven't they beaten Microsoft with better products ?", (he was getting a full head of steam now),"Can you honestly tell me I could just put in one of those Linux CDs and install Linux as easily as Windows XP ??", he said, hoping that would finish me off. I saw my chance, "Yes !!", I said, "I have already done it many times - I had to".

  • Keeping Windows secure In my other article (Microsoft and the common man) I said : Any business that can't keep its systems secure and operational is either going out of business or going back to the 19th century. That might seem a bit extreme, but we have heard of viruses getting to cash machines [ NY Times ] [ The Register ] and if that wasn't enough, some viruses are seeking credit card information [ The Register ] so, what can you do about it. Here are some clues

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