Improving your security a little....

As I was coming onto this website to start this entry about security on our own
PCs, I got a musical pop-up appearing over my Firefox browser (which usually stops these kinds of things from coming up) and it looked like this.....

And if you read the fine print it boldly confesses that it's got absolutely nothing to do with the real Google - it's just using that to grab your attention and lull you into a false sense of security, which you'd better not have! This is the very kind of shit we need protection from - and we need a special program that will track back to them and let them know how much we love that crap. But I digress..... back to the main topic: Making your PC a little safer, at least we hope so, and so here's a couple of screenshots as a kind of "How To"....

First of all, Go into Control Panel > System > Remote Settings, and remove any check mark in the box for "Allow Remote Assistance connections to this computer". If you've needed to make changes, click "Apply" and "OK" before closing that window.

Another thing you can do, unless you're not your own Administrator, and you're not on a corporate network requiring your computer to interconnect with others
at work, then you can go into Control Panel once again, to Administrative Tools,
select Computer Management > Services and Applications > Services, and there
scroll down to the four entries marked in the above. Select each by clicking on it, then right-click that highlighted entry to get access to the menu allowing you to click on its Properties window. In there, you can choose settings for its various ways of running, or not, and in there, select "Disable", or in other words "None of the above", so it doesn't run at all under any circumstances. These four items all relate to various remote connections that we can probably do very nicely without. So far, nothing horrible has happened to my computer as a result of disabling those four items. So it's your choice - but it's certainly worth some consideration if you're the nervous type, like I am. Because, the Wild, Wild Web
is usually anything but the way it seems to be these days, and there's far too many examples like the one on here that I opened this with, above. Speaking of which, what's it all about? It's offering you some gifts for answering some really idiotic little questions that almost anyone would answer "yes" for, just so everybody qualifies for one of those gifts. But to claim it, you'll have to give them some of your personal information, won't you? 

And that's the name of the whole ballgame, Kiddies - they're fishing or phishing or however you want to spell it, they're trying to con you out of your private information so they can use it somewhere else for something they aren't telling you about. And that really ought to make you suspicious enough that you will not take their bait, and instead, just quietly click the big red "X" in the upper right corner of that cute little window, and get the hell out of there fast!

And this is why the security problem worries me enough that I write about it.