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.
