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 retired as the Manager of Technical Services for The E. Philip Saunders College of Business at The Rochester Institute of Technology in 2014. I run Ask Nick! (which you should definitely visit), a Web site where I curate computer-related news. I cohost a weekly radio talk show on computers called Sound Bytes. I used to write a weekly computer Q&A column for Gannett's Democrat and Chronicle each week. I also used to do a computer call-in show on Time Warner's cable system, but alas, those days are past.

On the radio, in the newspaper, on the television show I used to do - over the years, many questions seemed 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, otherwise you're just stumbling around), and that name stuck. I put up a page on both Ask Nick! and the Sound Bytes Web sites about the Tango, but I got tired of updating two pages on two different sites every time things changed. Also, people continued to have more questions about this stuff than a single page could encompass. Also new operating systems and products come out, and they have issues, too. So I now concentrate all the information in this one site, and continue to add new information as it comes along.

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. Steve Rea (one of my co-hosts at Sound Bytes), who knows more about Apple products than any one human being should, keeps me on the straight and narrow for both the Macarena and the Iphone Pavane.

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! and Sound Bytes for all their hard work and expertise in getting this information to me.