Several people write asking about the links in my emails. The email shows one thing but the actual link points to “clicks.aweber”. What is that about? This is nothing to worry about and quite normal.

Aweber is my email service provider. They take care of sending the emails, bounces, and all sorts of other things. They also count the number of times the links in the emails are clicked. I do not get a list of who clicked what just a total number of clicks on each link. That is it.

If your click being counted is troubling to you all you need to do is copy the visible link and paste it into your web browser.

Here is an example of what I am talking about. To visit the blog and read the quick tips we sent out this week you can go here:

http://www.TNPCnewsletter.com/blog/

If you hold your mouse over the link it should popup and show you the link underneath which is a “clicks.aweber” link. Clicking the link will take you to “clicks.aweber”, count your click, then send you on to the blog. Pretty simple really.

I have used Aweber for more than 10 years and knew the people who started it for years before that. If you need to send email to a group, or updates I can recommend the service without reservation:

Aweber Email Services

If you want to read more about how to know if a link is harmful or not read this:

http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/blog/2007/06/21/i-almost-fell-for-it…/

Hope that explains what we are doing a bit. Share your opinion in the comments below.

It’s wacky. All the end of the world talk and the date is still in the future. Thankfully it isn’t as hyped as Y2K was. Nevertheless I posted this at 12:12 on 12/12/12. I’m sure I’m not the only one but this is most likely the last chance I will have to do something with all the times/dates in synch.

The last 2 little tricks were well received. If you read the comments you will see I had a disagreement with one use over the use of “@example.com”. I still think you should only use “@example.com” when entering a random address. You never know who you may have to deal with the email otherwise.

Click here if you missed those tips

Here are a couple of more quick tips for getting information under control.

When I sign up for automated email lists I never use my real name. My current favorite is Sponge Bob. When I see mail addressed to Sponge I know it isn’t personal and can wait till later to read it or just hit delete. It amuses my children too. I used to use Jed Clampitt until a customer of mine was really named Jed Clampitt! I thought the emails from him were tests I had sent.

Having said that please keep your real name with me. As you know I do answer personally and do remember conversations with you over time. I appreciate it.

Here is another idea. When you are fill in a form that requires an address put this in the second address line:

do *not* send unsolicited mail

Any mail the company sends you will have that line in the address. Even if the company sells your address the line is usually still there and you can easily sort the mail. Any mail I receive with that in the address gets immediately trashed.

If the form wants your phone number I always try BR549. That rarely works but amuses me. Failing that I use a free Google Voice number that is set to go directly to Voicemail. The exception to this is when ordering something. Then I use the Google Voice number in case the company has a question.

If you wonder why BR549 then count yourself younger than me!

Using some of these easy techniques can really help you cut into the information overload and give you back control of your time and attention.

Leave a comment below and let me know if you use these or have another idea.

I recently installed a program in my web browsers to help stop all of the behind the scenes tracking of my online activities. So far it has worked well and I am recommending it to you as well. This software is free and is called Do Not Track Plus. You can find it at this URL:

http://www.abine.com/dntdetail.php

I made this little movie so you can see how it works in action.

If privacy on the Internet is a concern to you give this program a try. After you use it a bit let me know your experience in the comments below.

It’s pervasive. Everywhere you look companies and websites are trying to gather more and more data on you. I want to discuss this issue and I’ll point you to a tool to help.

I recently read an article about some of the new Facebook attempts at data gathering.
The article talked about attempts to match offline purchases from online ad displays.

From a technical standpoint these attempts are interesting. But from a privacy point of view not so interesting. Even a bit worrisome. One of the real issues is you never know what is being gathered. Even if you do know you have no way of knowing what dots are being connected behind the scenes. Then there is the question of what dots will be connected down the road.

Over at the blog I tell you about a tool you can install on your web browser to minimize the tracking Facebook and other companies use to monitor your movements. It is a free tool and in my tests has worked quite well. If you are not interested in some technical talk just click the link and get the tool. If you want some more technical talk keep reading after the link.

Click here to find out about the free software

For several years a big portion of my job was to analyze the data generated by visits to websites. In particular we were interested in minimizing the guesswork that visitors had to go through to find what they were looking for. This was pre-Google and a private website.  The website had around 22,000 pages and on average received 9,000,000 requests for pages each month. That was a lot of data to crunch. And this was before there were tools to crunch it for you. I wrote a few of my own just to save some time. Today the tools can show you all sort information about your online activity.

How does this cross tracking work exactly? Let us assume you have a Facebook account. When you visit Facebook puts some cookies on your computer. Now anytime you visit a site that is tied in to Facebook that cookie is noted and updated. Even if the site you are visiting is not part of Facebook. Most of the time that you see the Facebook logo on a page and when you see Facebook being used for comments that tracking is taking place. Is someone linking to a picture on Facebook? That can do it too. The data gathering is pervasive.

The big question is this. Are companies using your data and habits to track you specifically? At a certain level yes. But on a bigger scale they are looking for overall trends they can use across broad groups to sell more products or influence opinions.

On an individual level the data will be used to display advertisements closer to your interests. I’m not opposed to this so much in concept. It really is no different than a sales clerk paying attention to your likes and dislikes then suggesting items you may like. It saves you time and can be enjoyable. It can also be expensive at times! But to have it automated makes me uneasy.

How do you feel about all this? Let us know in the comments below.

Hope you find the software useful. I have. Now if I can the same thing for my phone it will really be nice.

It has been a short while but things have been very busy.
More about that soon. Today I want to share a concern and a
fix for that concern. The email looks long but if you are in
a hurry you will only need to read the first few paragraphs.
You can come back for the rest later. Thanks for reading – I
really appreciate it.

It’s pervasive. Everywhere you look companies and websites
are trying to gather more and more data on you. I want to
discuss this issue and I’ll point you to a tool to help.

I recently read an article about some of the new Facebook
attempts at data gathering. The article talked about
attempts to match offline purchases from online ad displays.

From a technical standpoint these attempys are interesting.
But from a privacy point of view not so interesting. Even a
bit worrisome. One of the real issues is you never know what
is being gathered. Even if you do know you have no way of
knowing what dots are being connected behind the scenes.
Then there is the question of what dots will be connected
down the road.

Over at the blog I tell you about a tool you can install on
your web browser to minimize the tracking Facebook and other
companies use to monitor your movements. It is a free tool
and in my tests has worked quite well. If you are not
interested in some technical talk just click the link and
get the tool. If you want some more technical talk keep
reading after the link.

Click here to got to the blog and checkout the free software

For several years a big portion of my job was to analyze the
data generated by visits to websites. In particular we were
interested in minimizing the guesswork that visitors had to
go through to find what they were looking for. This was pre-
Google and a private website.  The website had around 22,000
pages and on average received 9,000,000 requests for pages
each month. That was a lot of data to crunch. And this was
before there were tools to crunch it for you. I wrote a few
of my own just to save some time. Today the tools can show
you all sort information about your online activity.

How does this cross tracking work exactly? Let us assume you
have a Facebook account. When you visit Facebook puts some
cookies on your computer. Now anytime you visit a site that
is tied in to Facebook that cookie is noted and updated.
Even if the site you are visiting is not part of Facebook.
Most of the time that you see the Facebook logo on a page
and when you see Facebook being used for comments that
tracking is taking place. Is someone linking to a picture on
Facebook? That can do it too. The data gathering is
pervasive.

The big question is this. Are companies using your data and
habits to track you specifically? At a certain level yes.
But on a bigger scale they are looking for overall trends
they can use across broad groups to sell more products or
influence opinions.

On an individual level the data will be used to display
advertisements closer to your interests. I’m not opposed to
this so much in concept. It really is no different than a
sales clerk paying attention to your likes and dislikes then
suggesting items you may like. It saves you time and can be
enjoyable. It can also be expensive at times! But to have it
automated makes me uneasy.

How do you feel about all this? Click over to the blog and
let us all know:

http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/blog/

While you are there check out the software I link to help
reduce the amount of tracking when you surf the Internet.

In the interest of full disclosure I should also point out
that I am using tracking in this newsletter and on the
website. The links in these emails go through our service
provider. They keep a running count of how many times each
link is clicked. That is all.

At the website we collect statistics on various things but
primarily of traffic patterns and visitor behavior. What
visitors looked at, when was it looked at, what did they
look at next, how long was it looked it, etc. This isn’t an
exact science and again we look for trends. It does not
identify you personally it just tells me the number of times
a particular item was viewed.

Hope you find the software useful. I have. Now if I can the
same thing for my phone it will really be nice.

It’s scary. My computer became infected with malware. A program masquerading as a system utility suddenly took over everything. I almost fell for it. Almost.

The malware was named S.M.A.R.T. HDD.  The program masqueraded as a disk maintenance program. My computer is a fairly new laptop and still has lots of the vendor specific programs loaded and running. My initial thought was the program was one of those. That is how I was almost fooled.

The first message the program tossed out said the my Hard Drive Boot Sector Reading Error then lots of messages started popping up about not being able to access the drive.

Here are some notes about what I did. I’ll clean these up shortly.

IMPORTANT: The various instructions below are only if you already have the S.M.A.R.T. HDD malware. If you don’t have it don’t change things. But do make a mental note that these instructions are here should you ever need them.

The first thing I did was reboot the machine. Of course it came right up. So much for my boot record being bad. After going into Safe Mode I searched for the program name and found some instructions on how to get rid of the problem. Those instructions only partially worked. After a little bit of manual tweaking I was back to normal. You can see the instructions I followed here:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/remove-smart-hdd

There is a screenshot of what the program looks like there as well. If you aren’t very technical you may be a little intimidated.

On more recent versions of Windows you can run Windows Defender and it will do a decent job of cleaning up the system. If you do this then you can skip to Step 6 of the instructions at the link above. You need to run the unhide utility mentioned at that site so you can see all of your files again.

In my case I still needed to edit a registry entry to find the actual program, delete the files, and remove it from trying to start. To do this open the registry editior (Start / regedit) then locate the following key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]

Look through the entries for something with gibberish. In my case it was this:

“dhWpWLrHmsphLmp.exe”=”C:\\ProgramData\\dhWpWLrHmsphLmp.exe”

Your entry may be different but it will be gibberish. Look at the bolded part of my entry. That is where the program is installed on your hard drive. If the program still exists after you run Windows Defender you can go delete the gibberish files. After the files are gone you can safely delete this registry key.

Note – I’m intentionally leaving some details out here. If you aren’t comfortable editing your registry find someone you know and trust to do it for you. And always make sure and back up the registry before making changes.

One other thing. After booting back in to a normal login I had to reset up my Desktop settings – wallpaper, colors, etc. The other thing that happened was my anti-virus program flagged at least one of the programs I used in the Bleeping Computer instructions as being suspicious. I expected that because those programs are looking for programs that are suspicious.

That is what I needed to do to clean up my system. Haven’t had any problems since.

Hope you found something useful here. If you have had problems with this particular malware or other malware share your experience below.

It’s a hit! Two quick things. A reminder about the Internet Archive

and an easy fix to a perplexing Firefox issue.

Yesterday I told you about the Internet Archive. Based on the
emails that are coming in it is quite popular.

If you visited the Archive or used the WayBack Machine why not
share what you found by commenting below.

The second item involves the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the
AVG anti-virus product. Three people who call me for help were
having problems launching Firefox. They would launch Firefox and it
would promptly crash without starting.

After talking to all three it turned out they had all installed AVG
recently. After the install of AVG Firefox no longer launched.

It turns out that AVG is using some called it calls “AVG Safe
Search”. Basically AVG adds a button to your Internet search
results telling you if the site is safe or not. I noticed this Safe
Search while trying to fix my Dad’s machine. We looked in the AVG
preferences, turned of the Safe Search feature and Firefox started
right up like it always did.

If you are having a problem launching Firefox and you use AVG try
disabling the Safe Search. It was the solution for all three of the
people calling me for help.

Have you run into this issue? Leave a comment below and let us
know your experience.