AV-Comparatives have, until recently, been a site I trust.

I’ve referred you good readers to them before as a place of independence.

But today, IMO, they’ve blown that trust.

In their words:

At the end of every year, AV-Comparatives releases a summary report to comment on the various Anti-Virus products tested over the year, and to determine the winners in the various tests.

All sounds good so far – but last year, 2009, they awarded “AV Product of the year” to Symantec.

What?

How on earth can the widely recognised bloat that is Symantec beat the likes of Kaspersky (2nd) or Nod32 (3rd) as two examples I do trust? OK, so no one company will get it right 100% of the time for 100% of the people, but day in day out Symantec AV software has shown to be problematical, slow and notoriously unfriendly to systems. And woe betide you if you want to remove it.

Take a look at the summary report on which they base their award. On the surface and just looking at the chart you’d be inclined to agree – and let’s face it; not many of us dig into the meat of reports like this. But I do and I did and it makes for far more revealing reading than the headline – AV Product of the Year. After all, will Symantec care that in the details they state “being recognised as “Best Product of 2009″ does not mean that a product is the “best” (underline emphasis mine) – ah right, so now the truth comes out.

So, explain it to me. How can you on the one hand award a best of and then on the other say it isn’t necessarily the best?

Either it is or isn’t.

As I said, Symantec won’t care as they’ll just use the headline.

Oh and you get all this at twice the price of the other two I mention. Go figure.

• Do you agree with me on trust?
• What about in this particular instance – should I just shrug my shoulders?
• Has any security company lost yoru trust?

Here are 10 of the most popular Internet Scams.

I list them purely for your edification in the hopes that you don’t get caught out by them

- or that you can use this as either a quick reference

- or as a pointer for friends that may need some advice.

So, without further ado and in no particular order:

1. Nigerian scam – aka 419.

This almost always appears as an email from someone that is the “relative of the late [insert grand title]“ – in short they utilise emotion to try and get you to part with smaller sums of money in return for a decent %age of a much larger sum. One of the best sites out there for advice and fighting back is 419 Eater.

2. Lottery scams.

Similar to the 419 scam this one typically asks for an up-front payment to release the funds you’ve won. See FraudAid for some great advice.

3. Advance Loan Fees.

These, like the previous two, will ask for an up-front fee typically referred to as an admin or processing fee. They will normally ‘guarantee’ the loan – but ask yourself this: Why, when a conventional bank or credit card company will add the charge to any loan, do I need to pay an up-front fee? Short and to the point advice from Fraud.org.

4. Holiday scams.

These almost always take the approach that you’ve won a greatly reduced cost cruise or holiday but you never get to hear the ‘catch’ until you’ve signed up and paid what you believe is the total cost. Then the hidden clauses come out. ExpertLaw.com appears to have the best coverage of these types of ‘deal’.

5. Phishing scams.

I’ve talked about these before – see my full advice here.

6. Disaster relief scams.

I trust I don’t need to spell this one out? Instead I will simply say – go direct to the homepage of your favourite disaster relief charity and donate there. And if you don’t know any then check out CharityNavigator.

7. Chain eMails.

This is the modern equivalent of a chain letter and you are asked  to forward a small (typically) amount of money to a name & address and add your own to the bottom. More advice and fun at some of the emails out there from BreakTheChain.org.

8. Overpayment scam.

Best way to describe this is with an example. You want to sell item A for £100. Scammer B offers £500 in the form of a cheque (or similar) for goods they’ve sold in your country and for you to forward on the remainder. In this example £400. Then the cheque bounces and not only are you without item A but you’ve also sent B £400. Much more info on this type of scam at Scambusters.org.

9. Computer money making machine scam.

In return for some money, yes up-front, you are asked to install a program on your computer that opens lots of popups / adverts. Each of these effectively generate a click for that advert and ths income for the scammer. You are highly unlikely to see any return on this other then seriously impaired computer response. Avoid.

10. Employment scam.

The only reason this scam exists is to gather information – yours. Oh, and possibly your money too. The end result is likely to be fraud of some kind, either your ID is stolen or money from your bank (knowingly or not) and far from earning you money will always cost. Job-hunt.org has some great advice on this type of scam.

• Have I missed any obvious scams?
• Have you any great links to share that provide advice on avoiding scams?

As today is my daughter’s 10th birthday (which is far more important than any country celebration <g>) I’m being lazy and just posting some links.

The links will show you that I’m far from the only site talking about internet safety but I do try to make my approach cover all aspects and not just children.

• PRNewswire is a web based press release centre – here’s one of their recent releases.
• i-Safe is a US based non-profit promoting education in internet safety.
• Internet Safety with Professor Garfield – everybodies favourite cat teaches internet safety.
• 180 TechTips does more than just general Tech Tips, they also have a specific section on the internet – 5 min lessons on tech, good stuff.

That’s all for now – enough to keep you going but this section will probably become a regular within my ISS series.

It would appear that a certain Irish ISP (no names, no pack drill) has taken to blocking content they deem as unsuitable. This follows on from another Irish ISP that has adopted the “three strikes and out” rule on file sharing.

They aren’t just blocking the unsuitable content but entire sites.

The worrying thing is the lack of choice offered and no prior warnings – just blocked unceremoniously. Additionally there is no burden of proof required – so malicious reports could easily see someone barred from the internet. When you consider that most schools in the UK expect children to have access to the web at home for school purposes – then we once again enter into the realm of a two tier society. The have and have nots.

But, I don’t want to get into the politics of these decisions here, but show how (in the case of the site blocking) it can be overcome with some simple changes. Equally, making these changes could improve your surf speeds even if you don’t get blocked.

The approach is to utilise a third party DNS service such as OpenDNS or Google.

If you’re not a fan of either or find they aren’t perhaps as good as your current ISP then try using namebench – which is a simple utility that has code for Windows, Macs and *nix. In their own words they state that namebench “hunts down the fastest DNS servers available for your computer to use“.

So why is this a 201?

Mostly because it’s a step above an intro lesson to DNS (covered here) as you’ll need to know how to access yoru router and change it’s settings – that I won’t cover here, but OpenDNS cover a ‘how to‘ for most major manufacturers.

And another way around this is to utilise one of the methods discussed here recently.

• Should ISP’s play judge & jury?
• What about other un-regulated setups such as the IWF?
• Ignoring for now, the dangers to minors are you for or against ineternet censorship by organisations?

Today’s post is a guest post from Kevin Weatherby. Kevin is a cowboy by trade and a pastor by calling and has some fantastic stories and insights and a wonderful ability to link stories from ‘the ranch‘ to real life spiritual applications.

Here’s one that caught my eye recently and Kevin kindly agreed to re-write it to better suit my tech blog. Thanks Kevin.

My friend Stuart asked me to pass along a few high tech cowboy tips and pointers post. I am always willing to help people out where and when I can. Today’s lesson will be on computer repair. There is a right way and a wrong way to get things done….I’ll leave you to decide which one this might be.

When you live 30 miles from the nearest anywhere, you learn to use a variety of things in a variety of situations. Cowboys can figure out how to fix items, or at least patch them, with the simplest things he has laying around.

I had lightning strike the house about 5 years ago and ruined my computer. I know I should have had a surge protector, but it was outside running the air compressor, the drill, two heat lamps, a fountain pump, a weedeater, a radio, a kick-butt chair massager, a battery charger, two ceiling fans, a burned up coffee maker, a curlin’ iron, and a cell phone charger.

Well, this computer wasn’t working, so I didn’t figure I would break it by trying to fix it. It was already fried. I opened it up to see if anything was wrong. The whole durn thing looked like a rainbow bright rat’s nest with all the colorful wires and green boards. I didn’t know the first thing about what any of that stuff did or where to begin. The whole thing looked broken to me. I couldn’t even find the cards from the Solitaire Game that I played so much. But I did find one of the mines from minesweeper. It looked remarkably like a mouse turd.

I figured I would just start where the cord went in the back. I had to take out about fourteen screws the size of a pencil lead just to get into the little box where the cord goes. I didn’t have a screwdriver that small so I just took a hacksaw and opened it like everyone else does. That is how ya’ll would do it, right?

Anyway, the first thing I saw in this little box was a fuse. It was not a big fuse, but it didn’t take an electrical jeanius to see that the durned thing was blown. I had never seen a fuse like this in my whole life. I didn’t know where I was going to find a “little weird computer fuse” store. So I did the next best thing. I made one out of baling wire.

All a fuse does is make electricity go from one side of it to another. Wire will do that. I went out to the horse pens and got some wire that was tied up there. I didn’t use the good stuff, I used the real rusty batch. It didn’t have to be pretty. It just had to run a little electricity. I taped that little piece of baling wire on the outside of that fuse and secured it with a little piece of duct tape. It’s very hard to get a piece of duct tape that small. I was afraid at one point I was going to have to get some bubble gum to make the wire stay put.

In the end though, the toughest part was getting the blasted thing back together, not fixing it. I had hacksawed all the little screws off and I couldn’t figure out how to get the cover back on. If I hadn’t seen that cover come off there with my own two eyes, I would have bet you a good dog that the cover was off something else.

I plugged the computer in and hit the magic button. The thing fired right up and I used it for about three more years.

Now that baling wire was not ever intended to be used to fix a computer. It might have worked out alright, but that definitely was not the tool for the job. I learned two things from that close encounter with the computer kind.

The first is to not be afraid to dive into something you don’t know anything about. You might surprise yourself with what you can do.

The second is that if you have to use a hacksaw to get into something, you should probably stay out of it. Let someone that knows what they are doing get the job done right the first time–without duct tape and rusted wire from a horse pen.

Let’s face it – we’re probably all addicted to social networking.

Whether you can walk away from it for a week or more or have to use it to tell us every minor part of your day from what you had for breakfast (and where) to what colour socks you’ve got on – then in some way, the very fact you are reading here is likely proof you use social media and possibly are addicted to it..

Well according to CSOonline “dozens of IT security professionals have pinpointed seven typical security mistakes people make” and they are:

• Over-sharing company activities.
• Mixing personal with professional .
• Engaging in Tweet (or Facebook/LinkedIn/Myspace) rage
• Believing he/she who dies with the most connections wins
• Password sloth
• Trigger finger (clicking everything, especially on Facebook)
• Endangering yourself and others

Please click through on the above link to see the detail.

Are you guilty of any of these?

Do you feel any of these are an over-simplification?

Here’s a freebie for you.

But it’s not me but Pandora Corp. that are giving something away.

Starting June 26th at 00:01 Pacific Standard Time (time conversion) which is equivalent to GMT / UTC 07:01 and finishing at midnight (PST) Wednesday, June 30th  they are giving away its signature computer monitoring software, PC Pandora 6.0, absolutely free!

Me, I’m against monitoring without first having discussion but if you’ve already reached that stage or you have another need for it, then I say grab it while you can.

Here’s how to get it:

Vist PC Pandora and use the code FREESUMMER2010. As I say – the giveaway will last until midnight on the 30th or until 50,000 units have been given away.

I’d barely got my new series of “Internet Safety Sunday” up and running when I was approached by Brightfilter to see if I was willing to review their software.

Of course I said yes and made it abundantly clear that to do it justice I would need an unrestricted version and that it would be totally unbiased without fear of favour. The only pre-deal I agreed to is that I’d let the company see this review first so that they could “respond to it as necessary” – you can see their response at the end in red.

So…

Who are Brightfilter?

They are a Bath (UK) based company that is fairly new (since 2004) to the world of filtering but appear to have made quite an impact already. They provide internet security solutions that “protect children online both at school and at home”.

From information found on their website they only “provide solutions” that meet standards or guidelines published by groups such as: CIPA; IIA; ISPA and IWF. They are also now a McAfee Premier partner.

What do they offer?

The easy answer is to say see the web but in short they offer:

• Family surfing protection and
• Educational surfing protection

Though these two broad sweep categories are far from the complete picture. The first is via a windows application and the second is typically via an appliance such as the McAfee Web Gateway unit.