So I was giving my standard “these days, buying online or doing your online banking is as safe, if not safer, than doing it via a real world transaction” line during a public Internet session the other day when some old guy puts up his hand and goes “What about that Silent Banker virus they were talking about on the news the other night?”
I've been on the road for most evenings lately and hadn't seen that particular report so I admited I hadn't heard about it, bluffed some answer about making sure you have your anti-virus program up-to-date and quickly changed the subject.
But after doing some research with the librarian's best friend it sounds like this is a very nasty little program.
Anybody have any more details? How does it get on your computer? Are most anti-virus programs able to catch it with their latest updates? Is there a program out there yet to specifically check for it? The people of rural Saskatchewan (including me!) need answers!
Oh, and speaking of the librarian's best friend, in my training sessions, I always point out that Google isn't the be-all-and-end-all and that there are other search engines that often have vastly different results – Ask.com, MSN Live and Yahoo! being the other main ones right now.
I also get my branch librarians to do a “vanity search” for their own name, first without quotes then within quotes then with a relevant keyword related to themselves (“Saskatchewan” or their community name or “librarian”) to illustrate how to use different techniques to improve and refine a Google search.
Even though this is part of the training, I hadn't done a vanity search on my own name for a long time and guess what I realised when I did – “Jason Hammond”, even without quotes, brings up my blog as the first result in all of the search engines I listed above EXCEPT Google.
I can't figure it out – before starting my blog, my regular web page used to be the first result for Jason Hamond as well. Now, even though I've submitted my new site to Google via their own URL submitter, it's just not showing up at all – even in the first few pages of results. Using quotes doesn't help and even a search for “head tale” only brings up my site via a third-party listing service called MyBlogLog.com. Very weird.
Comments 2