• No Comments
A couple of weeks ago BritInCalifornia was passing through, and apart from the excellent activities he mentioned on his blog post, we also, for old times sake, got geeky and assisted a friend who had fallen foul of one of the more pernicious and possibly immoral scams on the Internet.
This friend had found a website which offered subscribers the chance to watch DVD’s for £29.99 a month. He got as far as agreeing to the terms and conditions before getting cold feet and backing out. A couple of weeks later an Icon appeared on his computer and a pop-up kept repeatedly appearing, warning that he owed the company £29.99 and that he should give them his credit card details.
Uninstall doesn’t work, and, surprisingly, Norton, Spybot S&D and other anti-malware programs don’t recognise it as a problem. A quick google however revealed that many other people had experienced the same problem, and a website which offered information on removing this programme had been issued with a takedown order. This website provided most of the information on removing it, but we still had to improvise. Firstly we killed the processes running in memory from Task manager and we also found DLL files related to pm_proc and were unable to delete them, until we renamed them first.
The activities of this company come very close to demanding money with menaces, and they are under investigation by the Office Of fair Trading in the United Kingdom. If anyone else has problems, use the links in this post to get rid of the thing, then contact their local trading standards office.
• 2 Comments
The first time I heard a track from the Alison Krause/Robert Plant collaboration “Raising Sand” I was entranced. The interplay of their voices is sublime and the backing, perfect. Until I saw them perform on Jools Holland’s “Later” TV show, when they were even better, which followed on from one of the most [...]
• 3 Comments
I was sitting in my garden the other day, watching a Firecrest take a shower in the waterfall beside the pond, when it occurred to me that despite seeing more species of avian wildlife in my locality than ever before, I hadn’t heard the sound of a cuckoo around here for more years than I [...]
• 1 Comment
There is no doubt that if God existed he would be an Englishman, and the proof would be seen in a forest glade, in spring, in England.
Click on the slideshow to go to Picasa and see the large versions!
I spent Friday dodging showers with my tripod, camera and lenses, visiting a couple of my favourite [...]
• 1 Comment
The last couple of weeks have seen a lot (!) of rain and quite a lot of warm sun. This has ignited the burgeoning vegetation into growth, with the result that the garden is a hazy shade of blue from the forget-me-nots and bluebells, punctuated by hotter colours from patches of wall flowers and [...]
• No Comments
These days there’s a lot of bad sh1t coming at you down the Internet with viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, botnets and various hackers and script kiddies fiddling around. So anyone with a bit of knowledge is (I hope) sitting behind a nice firewall built into their router, with a software firewall as a [...]
• 1 Comment
Some people have way too much time on their hands -but the results can be worth it.
• No Comments
…then try this lot for size.
• 10 Comments
I’ve blogged before about the problems with AOL. Here, someone has nailed the cause of the problem.
• 4 Comments
Advertisements for women’s cosmetics these days are full of pseudo-scientific phrases like “contains bio-eugenic super peptides”, and are “approved by the United Kingdom Dermatological Society”. What this in reality means is “some words our admen found in a thesaurus” and “approved by the same people who sold you the stuff”.
Today, whilst watching a l’oreal [...]