Where Has All the Malware Gone?

In early June, the Apple Macintosh and PC world was hit hard with Malware, which would take over your computer under the cloak of tuning it up. The PC world jumped into action and plugged the holes with security patches... or did they really?

Recently I was talking to a friend at Google, and his take was that the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) simply redirected those scripts that loaded this junk to other sites. You see, when you search for a virus, the engines that work find the suggested links for you. In the case of these bad guys they found the sites and simply removed them from the linking engine, pretty smart!

So here is maybe a better solution: stop going to random links that search engines show. Am I saying don't use a search engine? No, I’m saying hold your cursor over the link and see if the link is directed to a main site or some cryptic location. Cryptic is bad. Many if not all browsers will show more detail on the site by just hovering over the link, which should give you a better chance at not getting infected.

Now that you are safe, let us talk tablets for a minute. The tablet world is exploding with new units every day. They run Android, Webos (HP), Windows and iOS(Apple), which makes the playing field crowded. The burning question today is, which one is best, and my take is this: wait a little longer, the sky is falling.

The pricing of all tablets is compressing because there are too many on the market. None of them really does anything better than another, they all do pretty much the same stuff. So by waiting, you’ll see pricing drop 10-20% in October (except maybe for Apple products). The one big thing you should ask is, why a tablet at all? For me the laptop is my mode of use over a tablet, but hey, to each his own.

Quick Note: As of Aug. 2 a fake Flash player for the iPad/Mac is out in the wild. Do not search for Flash players, as you can get infected. Please head to www.adobe.com for a Flash player for Windows, as Apple OS doesn’t support Flash.