Thanks to Tom.
And just a heads up to William Wagner and anyone else out there
that doesn't know...
William, can you check something out for me ?
https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2
If that link doesn't work, try:
http://www.grc.com/default.htm
Scroll down to the ShieldsUp! link and see if you can get that
to work ? It is a port scanner that will identify any open ports
on your system. Your Snitch software will probably alert you
to quite a few a things. There should be a "Common Ports"
link that you should try before trying to do all ports. I'm a
little ignorant on whether that webpage will work on a MacIntosh
system.
As far as any computer goes, PC's or Mac's or other, IP addresses
are being contacted constantly. I am not familiar with what "Little
Snitch" is, so I assume it is firewall software. My IP address is
contacted about 10 to 40 times a minute, every minute of the day,
and it doesn't matter that my IP address changes. The reason this
happens is because there are a lot of people out there that are
probing just about every port on the Internet. A good firewall will
hide your system and drop incoming packets that are sniffing your
system. Not only are people scanning ports trying to detect open
systems, but virally infected systems may do the same and there
seem to be a lot of virally infected systems out there. It seems as
if most people program a virus to do a couple things:
1) open a port on the infected system,
2) broadcast the open port to people that want to know,
And then there are the other type of viral programs. The ones above
are really called worms because they burrow into your system and
create a hole for other worms to crawl in. :-)
Viral programs tend to contact a system, may or may not open the
system up for Internet communications, but these are the ones you
generally hear about that infect a floppy drive, a CD and so on.
Their goal isn't so much to open the system up for contact, but is
to spread their infection around.
Then there are the viral worms that exhibit both behaviours.
I have noticed that a lot of worms are not detected by anti-viral
software. For PC systems, folks are told to get commercial anti-
viral software, a firewall as well as two other anti-tracking
softwares. :-/ The fact that Microsoft built the operating system
so openly, provides PCs with a lot of freedom, but certain
corporate entities decided to abuse that freedom and create
intrusive software.
http://www.lavasoft.de has the LavaSoft AdAware software
that is free and one of the most highly recommended tools to
install on any Microsoft Windows operating system.
http://www.safer-networking.org/ has SpyBot Search & Destroy.
This is more free software that should be installed on every
Microsoft Windows system.
http://www.grisoft.com/ has a free anti-viral software product as
well, but I've noticed that it is not recognizing some older viruses.
This is some more free software, and it's currently the only anti-
virus product I am using on this system. So I do recommend to
others that a commercial anti-viral product like Symantec or
Macafee's but I don't use those myself. :-/ I guess I am one of
those guys that doesn't practise what I preach. :-( So I pass this
on with that disclaimer.
The firewall software that is generally used on a PC is called Zone
Alarm and is available on a trial basis at
www.zonelabs.com or
you can get a freeware earlier version from
www.oldversions.com.
It's PC only software though.
Hope I've cleared up some things.
--
Jim Carlock
http://www.microcosmotalk.com/
Post replies to the newsgroup.
"William Wagner" wrote:
In article, William Wagner wrote:
Nice little program "Little Snitch" shareware lets me know about
anyone trying to contact my machine. For Mac's but PC folks may have
something similar.
William (Bill)
Now back to garden stuff.
--
Zone 5 S Jersey USA Shade Earth sometimes.
There is atleast one word misspelled deliberately in the above post.
)
http://www.oxymorons.info/ lots of word fun!