Yes, Gmail was down today, September 1, 2009 for a stretch this afternoon. Really it wasn’t more than about two hours at the most from what I saw and from what I hear IMAP/SMTP access was working although the web interface was down. I found out a few interesting things during the outage though. …
As I’ve seen the continuing FLOOD of searches for some way to Remove Windows Police Pro, I’ve been starting to wonder at the who is behind this particular piece of junk software. These programs aren’t written by your average ordinary virus writer, there is really too much spit and polish on these and the end result is a racket which resembles a mob shakedown along the lines of “it’d be shame if anything happened to your important data”….. I’m intrigued by some that are speculating that there’s a connection to the Total Security 2009 package. The reason they’re saying that is some of the top sites for removal of Windows Police Pro are actually shilling ANOTHER rogue security program Total Security 2009. If that isn’t moving from the frying pan to the fire. They also suggest a connection with the XP Police Antivirus (which was yet ANOTHER of these wolves in sheeps clothing.)
I’m seeing a lot of searches for how to remove Windows Police Pro this evening. It looks like it’s ALSO the latest flavor of the minute in the rogue security application crowd (take a look at remove Green AV for another rogue). As stated before… my usual path for removing a rogue antivirus or antispyware application is the same as any other malware, try to get other malware removal software on the system (such as malware bytes antimalware or super antispyware, AVG, spybot etc.) and get them running scans to eliminate it. (Virus Removal Toolkit for links.) (Make sure to get updates for the software first.) If that approach doesn’t get you anywhere then it’s time to find the name of the program file that’s running. It appears that with Windows police Pro, to remove it from the running processes you need to kill of the process called one of the following:
WindowsPolice.exe
WindowsPolicepro.exe
WPolice.exe
. You may need to reboot into safe mode, then you can rename (or just delete) the offending program executable…. here’s a suggestion for you.
I’m seeing a lot of searches for how to remove the rogue antivirus green AV. It looks like it’s the latest flavor of the minute in the rogue security application crowd. My usual path for removing a rogue antivirus or antispyware application is the same as any other malware, try to get other malware removal software on the system (such as malware bytes antimalware or super antispyware, AVG, spybot etc.) and get them running scans to eliminate it. (Make sure to get updates for the software first.) (Virus Removal Toolkit for links.) If that approach doesn’t get you anywhere then it’s time to find the name of the program file that’s running. It appears that with Green AV to remove it from the running processes you need to kill of the process called gav.exe. You may need to reboot into safe mode, then you can rename (or just delete) the offending program executable…. here’s a suggestion for you.
Just a quick note that I’ve updated the Antivirus Removal Tool list to include VIRUS removal tools. (I originally intended the list to be those utilities to clean up a system so that it could deal with a fresh install of an antivirus product. (Can’t count how many times I’ve had to use Norton’s tool.)) Anyway, it’s such a popular page, I thought it would be a bit more complete to add links to the antivirus vendors free tools for removing viruses/virii.
I just wanted to mention that I’ve added a new page with a rundown on the various Voice Broadcast or Voice Blast services out there on the net. It was only recently that I came to know these services as anything other than automated outbound voice messages as I think I referred to them in my old voiceshot review back in 2008 when I first ran across voiceshots’ service. I have heard them called robocalls as well….
Anyway, I’ve heard less than great things from others about Voiceshots support and so I wanted to get a more thorough look at who else provides similar services and how their offers compare. (It’s a sub-page of my new VOIP services page.
I came across an interesting one in the last few days. This system was a Windows XP system with current updates – SP3, IE 8…. and among other things there was a complaint of very sluggish behavior. I updated the antimalware software installed and ran scans. Malware Bytes antimalware actually found and removed two suspect files, but that didn’t seem to sole the sluggishness. The web browser (internet explorer) would take what seemed like a minute or so to respond to any action. One thing I discovered is that Internet explorer 8 can behave VERY slowly if there are a lot of sites in the restricted zone. (Spybot S&D immunization puts lot’s of sites in restricted zones.) So, I found a way to remove them all and retry and things seemed quicker, but… after running for 15-20 minutes the system really started to become unresponsive and so I had to start looking for another cause…. services.exe was running at 99% cpu or 100% cpu from time to time and the memory footprint was growing – the high mark I saw was 350MB of memory in use for it (!)
Last Thursday I opened up my GMail and found to my surprise that I had an invite to Google Voice. I didn’t have time to deal with it at that time, so I saved it as new until Thursday evening and spent some time then playing with it. I had put my address in the waiting list some time back because the premise behind Google Voice (former GrandCentral) is potentially very useful for me. I’m self employed, I work from home, from the car, I’m onsite, I’m at clients locations and I also have some bits of time at a location that has wireless access. For many years I’ve had several phones to check messages on, and if I forget, then…. find a message when I get in at 8 or 9 in the evening on the house phone. It’s difficult to manage and I want to change it, Google Voice may be the way to make that change….. right now I’m just testing the waters though. It did feel kind of like a Willy Wonka moment of sorts though seeing that invite in the inbox! Read on for more….
Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I ssh’ed in and found the vps was essentially ruined – it managed to wipe out quite a bit. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or if the wordpress upgrade was really the culprit, but it managed to destroy quite a bit. The support at westhost though had things back up within 24 hours. It wasn’t just a matter of the site and database getting deleted, but files in /etc were gone (mail configuration hostname resolution wasn’t working, scp wasn’t working…. it was trashed in a bad way.)
Anyway, I’ve still been tinkering with the free morse code mp3 ringtones. In particular I’ve been tinkering with the Text to morse code mp3 generator. I’ve been trying to add utf support. The backend generator does interpret morse for utf characters, I’ve managed to get a way to decode the url encoding if they’re placed in the text box, my big challange at the moment is the file name. I have to truncate the filename so that it’s not too long, but most everything I’ve tried to truncate counts bits instead of characters. Some, even if I tell it to count characters will assume that 1 character=1bit and I wind up with some of the utf characters cut short which gives unusual filename results. In the testing version of the script I’ve just decided to sanitize things by replacing an extended character with an x….
I’ve been struggling off and on with an issue on my Dad’s computer the last month or so. He said that it would occasionally just shut off completely out of the blue. (He also admonished me not to spend much time on it. Unfortunately problems like this are usually the ones that take the most time to solve because they seem random and it’s hard to pin down the cause.) He runs Windows XP primarily (although we have an ubuntu install setup as a dual boot choice.) In the last year the power supply and video card have been replaced for similar behavior. Although it’s been several months since the replacement with little “misbehaving” since. One of the things I did was run a memory test, which came out fine.
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