Darkreading.com has a list of 10 most dangerous things users do online, they are:

1. Clicking on email attachments from unknown senders
2. Installing unauthorized applications
3. Turning off or disabling automated security tools
4. Opening HTML or plain-text messages from unknown senders
5. Surfing gambling, porn, or other legally-risky Websites
6. Giving out passwords, tokens, or smart cards
7. Random surfing of unknown, untrusted Websites
8. Attaching to an unknown, untrustworthy WiFi network
9. Filling out Web scripts, forms, or registration pages
10. Participating in chat rooms or social networking sites

You probably have noticed a recent update to Internet Explorer. This is the fix for the notorious Google Hack that has become something of a PR disaster for China. The flaw in the browser would allow people to compromise the machine by visiting a website. Once you visit a hacked website, the browser runs a malicious program on your computer.

Bleeping computer has a tutorial for turning on and off the taskbar thumbnail preview. This is what shows what your programs are doing when they are minimised. If you want to know which window is which, you can simply hover over it. Of course, if you are irritated by this, you'd want to turn the feature off.

Although this is quite old news, back in August 2007 it is still relevant. emachines used to be a supplier of some frankly dodgy computers. They used to be one of those brands sold under the DSG (Dixons Stores Group) along with Advent, Packard Bell and a few others. Gateway used to supply good quality computers about 10 years ago, with a trademarked white boxes with Holstein cow prints in black. The company pulled out the UK to focus on its US market. Acer bought out the company, which made them No 3 in the US computer market.

If you bought a camera about 10 years ago, you'd be swamped by the different types of memory cards that were available. I think there is about 50 different types of memory card. SD (Secure Digital) cards have become the most popular, initially as SD card size for digital cameras, miniSD for mp3/mp4 players and then microSD (transflash) cards for mobile phones.

I suppose it comes down to knowing your market. When I started my business back in February 2006, I didn't know what I'd need for a website, so I built something that would suffice. The first version had a login system, so people could add comments and testimonials; track trouble tickets; use live chat and be able to book jobs into the calendar. I had created a website that did everything I thought my customers would need, which turned out to be over complicated. Over a number of rewrites it became what you would have seen last week. It also became a nightmare to organise, especially since I discovered Smarty, which is what this blog uses to do templates. The current pages are developed in PHP using Smarty templates. It means all the code that makes the pages work is kept separate from the look of the pages. Templates are basically HTML pages with extra Smarty tags, so you don't need to duplicate your HTML repeatedly.

When I wrote this website back in 2006, one of the problems I had was from spammers that would use the contact form to send out spam. Obviously the dumb spammers didn't cotton onto the fact that I was the only recipient. I introduced a method of spam control that limited the amount of spam I received, but now in 2010 has been an early spring clean for my website and a rewrite from Perl to PHP. This time around I'm using reCAPTCHA so that you need to type in the words you see to send the message. One of the things I've just noticed after reinstalling my blog is the amount of comment spam that gets generated. I copied over the content from the old blog and forgot to disable comments, so in the space of a couple of hours I had 5 spam comments.

I'm sure everyone remembers what a fiasco Y2K was (Year 2000) well it strikes again ten years later. Symantec, the people behind Norton Antivirus have a problem with their updates. A bug in their antivirus update system has declared all updates newer than 31st December 2009 as being too old. So until a new version of their software is available, all their updates will be dated 31st December 2009!