RE: [Futurework] updating address book Read This

[Karen Watters Cole]

Greetings from the Pacific Northwest.  Here is Everything You Need To Know About Plaxo but were afraid to ask, and then some more.   Since I know SW is REH’s wife, when I received four of them (one via FW, 3 under my old attbi, new Comcast and hotmail addresses) I updated my address info on one and deleted the others, but did not click on the free download.  Just in case, I manually ran Norton Antivirus Live Update.  Since then my regular weekly NAV Scan Check has run through all my files (21 min 18 secs) and no infection was found, nothing quarantined.   SW and REH are out of town*.  Otherwise REH would have responded on FW by now explaining the mystery.    Here is what I found at Google under Microsoft Plaxo, which is an automatic email address update program linked to MS Outlook:  http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/4498205.htm and http://www.plaxo.com/about/releases/release-05-21-03  but then there was also this, which is worth reading all the way through, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,905467,00.asp and from which I’m excerpting:   “In my book, the only difference between Plaxo and an e-mail worm is that Plaxo doesn't attach itself to the messages it sends. You have to go to the site and do the deed yourself. I find Plaxo troubling because it sends a complete copy of your contacts to a third party. Plaxo's privacy policy says it won't do anything with those addresses without your permission, but if that's the case, why does it want them? There's some boilerplate about only doing demographic analysis and offering future services and service levels, but as usual, if the company is sold, all bets are off. Plaxo contains a hack that mines your Outlook profile password so that it can retrieve your contacts unhindered. Although Plaxo claims that it does nothing with your password once it retrieves your contacts, I don't like this, because it makes child's play out of accessing passwords; any other process, such as a destructive e-mail worm, can access your password, too. An article at the apparently defunct site SecurityStorm (now taken over by a popup spammer--don't go there) had technical details of Plaxo's operation, as well as correspondence between SecurityStorm's owner/author and Plaxo CEO Sean Parker. The correspondence demonstrated Parker's reaction to criticism and also showed that he he has an itchy trigger finger with his lawyers. Parker is a Napster cofounder and has had some of the most vicious law dogs unleashed against him; he's evidently learned a thing or two.” So, if Microsoft makes you nervous, as a precaution, you might change your password, using alphanumeric and nonalphanumeric characters, which I’ve read makes breaking passwords more time consuming, so that a hacker hopefully moves on to easier passwords to break. Finally, my techie brother also recently installed a free download, zonelabs, which is a firewall specifically aimed at hackers. I recommend it on the Medium setting and advise that the first time any program wants to get through (including browsers) you will have to accept/decline but after checking Do Not Ask Again, that should be all.  There are other programs, of course, but this one is free, for now.  I would have contacted my brother and other techie friends for their opinion or recommendations regarding the above, but techies all seem to be night owls and I wouldn’t risk the wrath of computer gods this early on a Saturday morning.  If there is something to share later, I will do so.  .  - KWC *How does she know that? As some of you know, REH and I are second cousins.  I receive his Native family newsletter, so I know where he is this weekend, celebrating the Cherokee winter ceremonies.  Now that I’ve shared that perhaps I should add that REH and I are ten years apart and grew up in different parts of the world.  We finally met several summers ago, and he invited me to drop in and add my voice to FW, for which I am usually most grateful.  Besides blue eyes, we both share another family trait - a tendency to write long posts, ask a lot of questions, and a desire to get everything we can out of this new technology, this new learning tool and the people we can meet and come to know in the journey.