Who is watching You?Written by By Val .K.
Which is your preferred reality TV show: Survivor, Real World, American Idol, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, Big Brother, Dog Days, Starting Over, or Temptation Island? Or is it Paradise Hotel, Playing it Straight, Mad Mad House, Love Cruise, Last Comic Standing or Next Action Star? Would you prefer Road Rules, My Big Fat Fiancé, Forever Eden, Fame, Both Camp, or longer name Beg, Borrow and Deal? How about The Apprentice, Top Model, Rebel Billionaire, Extreme Makeover, I Want a Famous Face, and Fear Factor. Consider a more bizarre list: Queer Eye for Straight Guy and Queer Eye for Straight Girl, Can You Be a Porn Star?, Wife Swap, and Murder in Small Town X. Because list is long, I had to abridge it. What an abridgement! So, forgive me if I excluded your favorite.It appears, nowadays, that everyone has a new concept for reality TV. (Next season watch out for these new shows coming your way: The Cut, Rock Star, Fire me . . . Please.) But not all new concepts make it to TV land. Some, like dream conquests of Hannibal and Napoleon, are writ on water. For other day while browsing Web, I came across these "new" ideas for reality TV shows, which might never see daylight: Ultimate Reality, World's Scariest Prostitute Chases, World's Most Uneventful Videos, Middle School Blind Date, Rent-a-Cops, When Hobos Attack, Joe Heterosexual, Accountants, The Saddams, Meet my Internet Stalkers, I'm an Online Gamer. Since everyone is coming up with their own concepts for reality TV, I shan't be undone. So here are mine: Tax Evaders and My neighbors, Terrorists. The proliferation of reality TV shows only highlights their popularity—they are over a hundred of them running on cable alone. And their ratings are enough to make TV producers dream up more. For a decade running, out of 20 most viewed television programs 11 are reality shows. Like smash hit among reality buffs, Big Brother. But little do many fans of these shows realize its allusion to Orwell's classic novel, 1984, where machinery of a totalitarian state, personified by an anonymous "Big Brother," oversees lives of its citizens. In book spy cameras were every where—in bathrooms, in bedrooms, and at places of work! In days of yore spying was sole reserve of Intelligence agencies. Like American CIA, British MI6, Israeli Mossad, and defunct Soviet Union's KGB. Now, anyone who has right tools and a little time could play "Big Brother." Like in, Thailand, Asia, where peeping-Toms run amok and famous actresses and ministers are filmed having sex in their own boudoir, and beamed live to viewers all over country. (The Clinton / Lewinsky fiasco was sissy stuff.) And not too long ago in Spain, a man was caught by Spanish police for spying, and stealing people's data through their webcams. Scary? I have heard worse. Because you can also be spied upon through your computer monitor. Paranoia appears to be necessary in today's brave new world. Because privacy is nix. Hear this from Andrew Shen, a privacy analyst at Electronics Privacy information Center (EPIC): "Most people haven't fully grasped how everything that you see or do on Internet is recorded and stored somewhere." Or this more harrowing remark from Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems: "You already have zero privacy—get used to it."
| | Spyware attacks! Windows Safe Mode is no Longer Safe.Written by Kevin Souter
Spyware and virii are getting craftier. New methods allow them to boot up even when user attempts to use safe mode; making them extremely hard to remove.Many of us have run into an annoying and time-consuming error. With your machine running goofey you decide to run a scan for trojans and spyware. Following scan, which usually takes fourty minutes or longer if you scan entire system, you are hit with "access denied" error. Frustrating, for sure, but being savvy computer user that you are you decide to boot to safe mode to take care of issue. No spyware can load when booted to safe mode, right? Wrong. The newer variants of CoolWebSearch, HuntBar, and VX2 infections all load even when safe mode is used. There are a few different ways of accomplishing this, most common being that spyware registers itself as a critical system process. This ensures that it is loaded regardless of what happens, and makes it much harder to shut down. If you can't prevent it from loading then how do you kill it? The answer to that is easier than it might seem. If you're running Windows 98 or ME, then easiest way is to boot to DOS, and use a command-line scanner to search your hard drive. These scans actually tend to run a bit faster, since they have more system resources available to them courtesy of no GUI being loaded.
|
