03 February 2013

Hassles of the computer age

When I first saw the problem, I immediately started taking down links, trying to check sites, figure out what was going on and a hundred other items that I'd like to be able to have a staff of two to help deal with.  Since my staff consists of me, at the moment, I was overwhelmed, to put it mildly.

One would think, after the past couple years, that I would be able to deal with aplomb, "calm, cool, and collected" as my father would say.  Which reminds me, I have an article due for my newspaper that I'm going to have call her on.  Drat, the procrastination that caused the delay of sending in a year's worth of articles a month ago.  And the others, I've disconnected sharing of documents for now among various other items.

Now, the real state of panic didn't set in until I noticed an anonymous user in my chat, which I don't use, but kept open in the event I needed it, thinking chat history would help.  A race against several impending deadlines was on.  That ominous user began the state of panic causing me to begin shutting down my blogs.  I used another browser to help me retain control of my other accounts not connected to Google.  My panic was such that I was awake for 36 hours straight working on the situation.  I now understand how military can do it.  Adrenaline surely kicks in.  Wasn't even aware I was awake that long until the second set of computer checks was done.

After a three hour nap, I woke to once again, go over my computer with a fine tooth comb, much like the nit combs if you are aware of such an item.  Still, I'm probably not going to be happy until I get a new computer.  Hopefully, that'll be soon.  During the three straight virus scans for a total of 6 hours, I did some other things.    Even though I've done what I could, finding out the extent that hackers have got to, is causing me to double check my computer in the morning and in the evening.  Root privileges on servers?  My, oh, my.

I had started an immediate virus scan, which, of course, doesn't complete quick enough when one discovers that one needs to act fast.  So, after getting logged out, I felt I had taken enough steps to be able to concentrate solely on my computer.  Thus, the delay in posting since Thursday.  In checking the forums today, I've found there are a lot of people with the same sort of problem I had started to encounter.  Ahh, well, the further adventures of one, Mildred R Holmes, continues.  I'm not sure if I will be bringing that blog back online.  I will see.  For sure, Family Legacy will continue to stay off line as I didn't post to it often.  And the URL's for those blogs will not be available until I decide what it is I want to do.  I have 90 days to think on it.  And don't think it's just Blogger or Google, it can be anywhere.   Check the help center/forums for your site.

You can check the following by copy pasting and do a search as I've put a couple spaces so they can't be clicked through.

http://www.stopbadware.org/clearinghouse / search   to see if your site is blacklisted
http ://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2012/09/10/malicious-apache-module-injects-iframes /   explains servers

As many of us are writers, we should be used to doing research.