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News Bytes:

As promised, the Westchester News Channel 12 televised town meeting "Surfing for sex: Internet dangers" is now online at SurfSafely.com! The program is streamed to RealMedia 8 in two flavors, narrowband for 56k dial-up users and broadband for DSL, cable and corporate lan users. Each flavor is broken up into three bite sized 25 minute segments. This is a very informative program which highlights just some of the things many of us are doing online to help protect others from harm. Please set aside some time to view it in its entirety.

Theres a new poll at SurfSafely.com asking how you feel about the recent US Supreme Court decision to block the law that would have prevented commercial web site owners from making adult content available online. If you participate in this poll, please consider your response very carefully before voting. This is an important issue.

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New critical Windows vulnerabilities exposed

Here we go again. The latest round of major threats to personal computer security has begun. A ZDNet article from the news feed at SurfSafely.com today points to the inevitability of another heavy round of mass mailing worms, viruses and outright computer hijacking. Virus authors who succeed in infiltrating an unprotected computer may actually be able to seize full control remotely much the same way as legitimate remote control software, only by an unwelcome guest. If that should happen to you, pray that they do not find sensitive personal information on there like non-encrypted credit numbers, bank account information or tax records.

There are numerous utilities, many of them free, that can protect this type of information stored on your computer even if it is stolen. The reason is because these files must be unlocked by a secret password before exposing them. Otherwise they're stored encrypted and unusable to the new owner. While it is often not impossible to crack these programs, the logic behind using them is similar to the logic behind installing an alarm system on an automobile. It will completely thwart most attempts by recreational car thieves which account for 95% of all car theft. The true professional, however, can bypass almost any alarm to steal any car. The objective is to make it make it more desireable for him to move on to the next car that's easier rather than fuss with yours.

I will try to round up a few of these utilities to review them for you in an upcoming news letter. If you haven't yet subscribed to Microsoft's free automatic critical update notification service you should. We'll take you through it step by step in our next news letter too.

For now, please please please, click the Windows Update shortcut on your computer and follow the instructions. Repeat the process as many times as it takes for Microsoft to finally report there are no more critical updates to install. If it's been a while, expect to go through the process at least two or three times before you're done. This is very important to keep up to date, at least as important as good antivirus software.


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Featured sponsors!

We are delighted to welcome into our family of paid sponsors the following companies and individuals. Please visit them and thank them for their generosity to SurfSafely.com and our mission to create a safer Internet for us all. Better yet, why not join them and be seen here too?!

• Bronze

Best Website Design	Best Web Site Design provides web site design, graphic design (logos etc.) hosting and web site optimisation for UK companies. Established in 1996, this remains a family run company providing a personal service for customers. Services range from single page web sites or through to bespoke database driven e-commerce and interactive web site packages. The online shopping facility has low set up and running costs and allows web site owners to provide an e-commerce catalogue that fits within their existing layout. (4/19/04)
	Resource for people with bad credit seeking loans, credit cards, and consumer credit information. (4/07/04)

• Enthusiast

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Computer virus watch.

Of the 50 or so spam I receive every day, I receive no less than 4 with mail worms and viruses attached to them. Need I say more?

Please keep your antivirus software up to date. If your paid automatic subscriptions have expired just your latest free virus updates here:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x patch
Mcafee updates
Norton updates
F-Secure updates
PC-cillin updates

Very VERY important that you keep your Windows operating systems up to date too!
Windows Update

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Be informed,
Be involved,
Be well.

Sincerely,
Mark Brasche
Founder and CEO,
SurfSafely.com

Come visit our growing family of web sites and services
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http://surfsafely.com/ Our web directory/portal
http://Safe-PC.net/ Our in-home computer services
http://surfsafety.com/ Our online safety community site
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