Who's to blame for all this?
Well... that depends... do you mean "Who's to blame for writing malware?" or "Who's to blame for this site?"
Malware
Nobody knows for sure who's to blame. We catch a few now and then, but the problem is that there are so many "script kiddies" out there (see
Definitions), it's hard to catch them all. The technology to catch them gets better all the time, but the malware writers get better all the time, too.
This site
Ah. That's a different story. I'm
Nick Francesco. I'm the Manager of Technical Services for
The E. Philip Saunders College of Business at
The Rochester Institute of Technology. I run
Ask Nick! (which you should
definitely visit), a Web site where I answer people's computer-related questions. I cohost a weekly radio talk show on computers called
Sound Bytes, and host a TV computer show for Time Warner Cable's
YNN that is available on Digital Cable's Rochester On Demand channel. I also write a weekly computer Q&A column for Gannett's Democrat and Chronicle each Sunday, and a monthly column in ComputerLink Magazine.
On Sound Bytes, many questions seem to have the same answer - check for viruses, spyware, etc., etc. At some point, I jokingly referred to it as "The Security Tango" (because, like a tango, you can't skip any steps), and that name stuck. I put up a page on both Ask Nick! and the Sound Bytes Web site about the Tango, but I got tired of updating two pages every time things changed. Also, people continued to have more questions about this stuff than a single page could encompass. So I availed myself of the truly magnificent hosting services provided by the folk at CLSS Enterprises to set up this site, where I'll try to concentrate all the information in one site.
However, as we all know, it takes a village to make an idiot. My original instructions clearly needed tweaking, and my good friend Bill Bateman not only created a whole first step, but kindly tweaked the rest. Then the wonderful Lori Lynch (email her) smoothed life for folks after that first dance.
If you want to make contact with me regarding anything here, please email Nick at this site. Please, please, please - no questions! I get enough of those everyplace else! But if you have suggestions for programs I should put here, or corrections to data I've got here, I welcome them. Thanks!
I'd particularly like to thank the hardworking and generous members of Ask Nick!, Sound Bytes, and Droid Lust for all their hard work and expertise in getting this information to me.
