SPAM - Unfortunately it is making a comeback

It has been a while since I talked about spam. The last time I noted that the amount was dropping and most of my email were legit. Well that has changed in the last two months. I have noticed that the volume of spam is now rising and most of my email is now spam. Yahoo has excellent filters, but, I have been getting at least one message a week getting through so the spammers are now figuring out how to get past the filters. Google is still good as I don't remember getting anything that was spam in my legit inbox, but, I notice there are a lot more spam messages. The last provider is Bell and I am getting about 1 or 2 emails a month that get through, but, I flag them as spam so that Bell can update their filters.

This will be a continuing battle between ISPs and the spammers. The thing is that the ISPs can only react most of the time after the fact so there is always a small window of opportunity for spammers to hit your inbox. You can help by using the email filters that your ISP provides and when one does get through flag it so that they can update the filters. When you do get a message don't click on the 'unsubscribe' button if it is provided or don't reply to their 'unsubscribe' email address if provided. All you do is confirm that your account is live and we can almost guarantee that you will actually receive more spam rather than less.

I may be paranoid, but, keep your anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall up-to-date. These spammers may also try to embed scripts or auto-launch programs that will install software on your machine and take it over and add it to their bot network.

You can look at ClamAV, Malwarebytes anti-malware as a starting point for your securing your systems. Secunia also has a good package called PSI that will scan your system to see what is out-of-date, vulnerable, etc and allow you to keep your system-up-to-date. I use these on my home PC when I start up the dual-boot system to run Vista and not Linux.

Update (2009/09/22):

I am now running AVG on my Vista partition.  It seems to do a bit better on the detection of malware and does not impact the performance of the machine in any noticeable way.  I will be still keeping Clam on the Linux portion as I can then use that to scan my external HDD or USB sticks while staying in Linux.

Linux and Runescape HD - Update

When I wrote about using HD in Runscape I didn't give you all of the software and hardware being used.

I am Running Linux Mint - Elyssa KDE Community Edition. I let the system figure out what ATI driver to install and configure. Firefox 3.0.13 and java 6 Update 14 (1.6.0_14_b08). The hardware is a Dell inspiron 530 with an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT card. The monitor is an Acer AL1717. I applied all of the patches to keep the system up-to-date. So far I have not had any problems with running Runescape in HD mode and I can swap between my desktops and resize the Runescape session without causing any problems or crashes.

The only thing we cannot do now is play various games that are Windows specific and I hope it is only a matter of time before the gaming companies figure out that Linux is a more-than-viable environment for their games. I prefer running Linux as we don't have to worry about trojans and viruses like when we are using windows. Even if there is an exploit the community comes up with fixes/patches much faster than proprietary operating systems.

Linux and Runescape HD mode

I did a minor update this week for Java and the ATI driver to see if the HD mode in Linux works yet. To my surprise it did and it was very stable. I have been running this for the week and I have not had any problems yet. One more item that I can remove from the list that didn't work well (if at all). The only things now are my palm pilot and TV tuner to get working and everything that works in Vista will work in Linux. The other major item is income tax software that will run on Linux. Once I get all three items to work I can then think about removing Vista from my machine.

On a similar note I downloaded LinuxMint 7 KDE RC1 and I will be burning a CD and testing that out to see how it works. I also downloaded and burned PCLinuxOS 2009.2 and burned it on to a CD. I tested it out on my wife's machine and it looks good and solid. After backing up her machine I will be upgrading her and my daughter's machines. The distro still does not boot on my machine and I will need to take an inventory of the hardware and check out PCLinuxOS knowledge base to see why. I would prefer that all of our machines use one distro just to make it easier for me to support and keep up-to-date.