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VB Helper Newsletter
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Rod Stephens
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May 18, 2011 15:16 PDT
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This newsletter contains a cautionary tale. (Hopefully I'll send another
out soonish.)
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Yesterday in the "SmartScreen Application Reputation in IE9" blog:
... 1 out of every 14 programs downloaded is later confirmed as
malware.
Coincidentally yesterday was also the first day in years I got infected
by malware. I needed some video editing software (more on that in a
moment) and one of the tools I downloaded inserted a Firefox redirect
trojan. Basically whenever I tried to go to Google, Facebook, Hotmail,
or an anti-malware site, it tried to redirect the browser to an ad site.
For some reason it failed (hopefully because the target domain has been
shut down, disconnected, and melted into a puddle of slag!) but it still
stopped me from going where I needed to go.
I installed and ran SUPERAntiSpyware and Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and
was back up in running in a few hours. (Okay not so few because I have a
big disk to scan.)
The morale is: be careful out there. Even if a site looks legit, that
doesn't mean it is. And even if it is, that doesn't mean their software
isn't infected.
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So why did I need video editing software? I was trying to split and
compress some screencasts from my book "Stephens' Visual Basic
Programming 24-Hour Trainer" so I could post them on YouTube so you can
see what they're all about. Each Lesson (aka "Chapter") includes a "Try
It," basically a big exercise to let you try out the concepts covered in
the lesson. An explanation of the solution is printed in the book, a
solution is available for download, and a screencast on the accompanying
DVD shows the screen and plays my voice as I fumble through the
solution. (You can also see some classic Visual Studio Beta problems in
the screencast for Lesson 3.)
You can find the screencasts here:
Lesson 3, Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jxlebRMuu0
Lesson 3, Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLGIFmvZx7E
Lesson 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeJPTBTmNzA
Give them a look. (Note that the videos in the book are bigger--I
compressed them a lot to make them work better on YouTube.)
Even if you aren't interested in the book, please take a look and let me
know whether you think that sort of tutorial would be useful. If so, I
may post other examples of how to do stuff in Visual Basic on YouTube.
(I'm thinking tasks that require a lot of messing with the IDE might be
best shown here but I'm open to suggestions.)
(To add insult to injury, I ended up using Windows Movie Maker and not
the infectious video editing software I downloaded.)
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Have a great week and thanks for subscribing!
Rod
RodSte-@vb-helper.com
Twitter feeds:
VBHelper
CSharpHelper
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