This week’s ClickOnline

24 April 2005 by martin

In case you haven't seen it, ClickOnline is the BBC's Internet technology show which shown is on BBC News 24 in the middle of the night - thank heavens for Tivo. They also show it on BBC2 on a Sunday morning but this is a shortened version. The show usually features a couple of interesting articles and reviews of some viewer recommended web sites.

On last weeks show they did a piece on Internet security. They put a Windows XP machine on the Internet through a dial-up connection that had no anti-virus and no firewall software. The machine was compromised in 8 seconds !

In this weeks show they answered a viewers question, asking what software was used to detect to the security breach. The actual software used was called Process Explorer, but they recommended another piece of software called What Process because it was probably easier to use. If you find something suspicious I'd suggest you take a look at Ad-Aware or the new Microsoft Anti Spyware, both of which are free to download and use.

Another interesting web site featured this week was Icon Archive. It's a useful library of icons for use on your PC or web site.

I have found a few useful things on ClickOnline. Probably the best is a site called WatchThatPage. Basically you register some URLs and WatchThatPage tells you when those web pages change. You get an email saying what has changed and a short summary of the actual changes. It saves having to check web sites regularly for changes. I have it checking the software download page for my router so that I can see when the new firmware becomes available.