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1029usr078198
Forum Admin
USA
333 Posts |
 Posted - January 13 2011 : 06:15:46
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Listen now. or Download the archive.
Question: Jerry asks, "What is the difference between malware and spyware?"
Answer: Great question, Jerry, because you hear these terms all the time. The difference is that malware is a blanket term for any malicious software. Malware has two large subsets, viruses and spyware. Viruses and spyware really do much of the same stuff, but the difference there is that viruses incorporate a means to spread themselves, while spyware uses external means to spread, like email or peer to peer networks like limewire.
Cool Site: Wi$eUp: This week's cool site is WiseUp. It's at wiseup.tamu.edu, and so is a project of Texas A&M. The site's title is Financial Planning for Generation X & Y Women. It's a site that teaches money management principles in eight lessons, which are free when you register for the site. It's designed with a female audience in mind because it gets some of its funding from the US Department of Labor's Women's Bureau, but the lessons are good regardless of your gender. The lessons range from money basics, to credit and investing, to achieving financial security. After taking the class, you can return to the site for bimonthly 1-hour teleconferences on current financial topics. These include Q&A sessions from listeners. You can also submit your questions to their financial experts who volunteer their time to respond. The teleconferences are recorded and available as MP3 downloads. You'll find polls and money news on the site as well. The address is wiseupwomen.tamu.edu.
Cool Gadget: GoSmart Phone Clip: This week's gadget comes from CraziestGadgets.com. Lots of folks have smartphones with GPS capability, and this is an adjustable clip that lets you mount your phone on the steering wheel. That way, your GPS rides along at eye level and you can operate it if necessary without taking your hands from the wheel. Depending on where your instrument panel is, it might get in the way, so take a look at this one in the show notes. Without needing tools, you can adjust it to fit just about any phone and is said to be smaller than most dashboard mounts. Even if you don't have a smartphone, you may be able to use this so you don't miss calls while fishing for the phone, and in any event, having the phone mounted right in front of you is better than having to hold it in one hand and steer with the other, especially when using a phone that doubles as a GPS.
It's All "Geek" To Me: Spider: This week's term is spider. I'm scared of those things. This is not the kind that you kill with a can of spray. No, a spider is a program used by search engines like Google. It finds websites and then follows every link on every page it can find on that site. This lets it glean information about what the site contains. That information gets put into the search engine's database so you can search for it. They return every so often so that they can determine how many sites link to pages on other sites. The more links a site has from outside websites, the higher it will rank generally. Revisiting the site also helps the search engine's database stay up to date because web pages change often. For instance, back in the late 90's, Microsoft said they changed one page on their website every four hours on average. Now, it's probably much higher, but that's what a spider is: a program used to crawl the web looking for information so we can find it better with search engines.
Links
Tech Tip Friday's Show Notes RSS Feed:
http://www.daconsult.com/downloads/rss.xml
Wi$eUp:
http://wiseupwomen.tamu.edu/
GoSmart Phone Clip at CraziestGadgets:
http://craziestgadgets.com/2010/12/17/gosmart-clip-puts-your-smartphone-on-the-steering-wheel/
Spider at TechTerms:
http://www.techterms.com/definition/Spider |
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1/7/2011-Malware/Spyware,Wi$eUp,GoSmart,"Spider"
