In-car Wi-Fi
June 27th, 2008
Surf from the comfort of your SUV. link
Turn off AVG LinkScanner
June 14th, 2008
I read a recent posting on The Register about the latest version of the AVG antivirus tool, which resulted in me disabling the LinkScanner tool.
AVG 8.0 added LinkScanner in April and apparently one of the things it does is to scan links on Search Engine pages before you click on them to make sure that the landing pages do not contain malicious code.
The article talks about the side effects of using LinkScanner such as increasing traffic to websites with no actual human interaction being involved in the visit, and increasing your internet bandwidth usage. All well and good but what about other implications? If you read further on page 2 of the posting it goes on to explain that AVG pretends to be you and doesn’t mask your IP address or anything, so as far as that site is concerned, you visited it.
So what’s the problem? Well if you searched for something in Google and got ten links returned, one or more of those links could be to adult or anti-social content and your computer would actually visit them. Your ISP would then have a log on its server saying that a computer at your IP address visited a site that contained pornography or other such material.
To turn of LinkScanner open the AVG User Interface, double-click LinkScanner and untick “Enable AVG Search-Shield”.
Are you broadcasting your child?
June 1st, 2008
My partner asked me today if there was a baby channel.
“A what?” I said?
She was in the kitchen attempting to tune the kitchen TV into the WiFi video sender unit that was broadcasting from the front room. On the screen was a picture of a sleeping baby.
The WiFi video sender comes with 3 preset channels. The image was being broadcast on channel 3.
“It’s not a baby channel” I said. “Someone has a baby monitor that is utilising WiFi”.
The picture on our screen was of a neighbours sleeping baby. Taking a guess, I nipped outside and introduced myself to some neighbours that had recently moved into the area. They have a baby, and they are now aware that their baby monitor is broadcasting into the street.
I do like the idea of being able to keep an eye on your baby while you are out of the room, but it might be a good idea if these video baby monitors used some form of signal protection so that only you are the one receiving the signal.