The ever expanding offering at Google expanded … sort of … with the addition of the local search feature. A regular search would give local results at the top already if you included a city or other geographic information. This is just a further enhancement of that so far, but the blog entry at google promises more to come. Feel free to donate one or a hundred shares of google stock to us here at htmlfixit.com

Earthlink, a huge Internet Service Provider (ISP) has done a spyware audit of their users. Trojan’s have increased by 114%, a Trojan (named after the Trojan Horse) is a program that looks harmless, but opens a back-door to your PC that any nasty type can use to take over your machine to use for anything they like. The average machine has 25 spyware items installed, some are relatively harmless, many are not. This is a sobering report and it is this sort of thing that has forced me to install Firefox onto all my clients computers. Whenever I am questioned about why, I do a little test for them. First I make a list of 2o websites, and I send them to those sites in Internet Explorer. After that I have them run Adaware and look for spyware. Usually at least half a dozen are found. Then I have them visit the same sites in Firefox, and likewise scan for spyware again. The number of found items is nearly always zero. They require no more convincing.

Recently, a client of mine bought a new home computer and asked if I did home jobs. I went over to set up his PC/UPS/Scanner etc, and while setting it all up, I was given his old machine which I was told was so slow it was useless (a PII 266/64MB machine). After setting up his new PC, (and installing Firefox and Thunderbird, Adaware and a few other programs) I took his old machine home to have a look at it. This machine was Win98SE, and it had a staggering 453 spyware items installed on it. Not only that but it had 3 Viruses and a Trojan running. No wonder this thing took 10 minutes to boot, it had to start a ton of processes that did nothing for the user at all. I spent an hour cleaning the machine out, tidying up the registry, un-installing anything unnecessary and generally giving it the once over. Now I have a machine that is perfectly capable of handling E-mail, web browsing and Office documents. And for those tasks it is not slow at all. Best of all it now boots in about a minute. Before you buy a new system, make sure your old one isn’t doing a heap of stuff in the background that you don’t know about. If you are worried about Viruses and spyware, head over to http://tips.littlehosting.com/ for a detailed look at the problem and a heap of free software to get your machine clean.

Read the full Earthlink report here.

Godaddy.com is a favorite or ours for purchasing domain names. They are buying two commercials during the Superbowl this weekend. You can also view an add rejected by Fox in the post Janet Jackson costume malfunction era. However, in order to view the commercial they require that you to enter a captcha, a random image that must match what you enter in a text field. That got me thinking, isn’t a captcha before download a great way to slow down the crawlers who use up bandwidth. What do you think? Leave a comment with your thoughts, but first satisfy our captcha.

I’ve seen many articles of late talking about how how PDA sales are dropping world wide, I’ve also seen articles talking about how high end phone sales are climbing at a dramatic rate. This really should be obvious to the big manufactures, but apparently it isn’t. The reason is simple, people do not want to walk around with a PDA strapped to one hip, and a Phone attached to the other, it’s simply not logical to expect people to do that. After years of missing the point, first PalmOne with their Treo PDA/phone systems, then came the O2 with XDA models but until very recently, none of the really big guys have realised that the market for PDA’s has actually increased, it is only the market for PDA’s without phone functionality that is dropping. So now we have HP finally coming to their senses and releasing iPaq PDA’s with phone functionality, before long I expect it will be a standard feature for all iPaq’s. Expect the rest of the big manufacturers to follow suite once this takes off.

Given the choice of PDA to have phone functionality added, I’d definitely go for the Sharp SL-6000L Linux PDA, because it is so far the most powerful impressive unit I’ve seen. I suspect that more work has to be done to make walking around talking into your PDA look less geeky. A friend of mine is the proud owner of an O2 XDA and he looks like he is talking into a flat silver brick. Expect to see some innovative new designs as manufacturers work on new ways to shrink the PDA’s without reducing the screen size and keyboard usability. My next phone will be one of these babies, probably from Panasonic, Motorola or NEC (or any of the other manufacturers that are using Linux on their phones.) It’s an exciting time to be a geek.

A new virus is out folks, it only affects Windows machines, (shock horror), And it poses as pictures of a dead Saddam. The virus writers are getting pretty good at picking subjects that will invoke the most curiosity and it’s something of a judgement on humanity that the most successful virus’s seem to be those promising naked folks engaged in rude acts or pictures of dead people. Getting infected by this one can result in being turned into a SPAM gateway, or anything at all that the crackers want to use your machine for. If you are not sure that your spam protection is up to date, head over to ClamWin and get yourself a free copy of this excellent little anti-virus program. If you are using a Mac or a Linux box, take this opportunity to have yet another laugh at the silly Windows users. 🙂 Read more at Sophos.

The Australian Consumer Association’s Choice magazine has tested installation and usage of various Linux distro’s, Mac OSX and Windows XP and found that Linux is just as easy to install and use as either Mac or Windows. The review was very simplistically written, but that’s to be expected of a magazine primarily sold to non geeks. Read more here. Read the article here.

According to this story on TheInquirer, the time spent deleting SPAM E-mails in the US workplace is costing them 22 billion dollars a year in lost productivity. I’ve always suspected as much, if my servers didn’t spent all their time running emails though the 3 different CPU intensive SPAM filters they run, I could have made a significant contribution to mapping the human genome. 🙂