Whenever I see these lawsuits I have to wonder what the point is.  Now I understand that downloading a movie is against the law and that when you do it you are committing a crime essentially but these people who are sued are rarely charged with crimes just  civil suits.  Civil suits are expensive and are a long and hard process so usually a positive end result is necessary to want to endure it.  These cases in the past end in huge judgments that the defendants would never have the means to pay in a lifetime.  So I have to wonder the point?!?

Even in the very best scenario, which is them winning a large monetary judgment from each defendant as well as having all their legal fees covered, how many of the people who they sue actually make that kind of money in a lifetime?  So they get a big judgement but they likely see a small fraction of it ever come back and they still have very real legal fees that have to be paid.  So even if they win big they actually lose.

I guess it could be said that it makes an example out of the people and will scare some people “straight” into not downloading illegal media anymore.   However, that theory totally disregards the fact that people download movies and music from these sites because it’s the only place it’s available in the format that people want.  There is nothing the movie or music industry can do to drive us back in droves to the movie theater or standing around the corner of a music shop all night waiting for a CD to come out.  Those days are gone…these industries have chose not to keep up with what their consumers want and the best answer they have is to go to war with their customers.

Up until now the movie and music industries have given us nothing to get media the way we want it.  We get tiny little teasers such as hulu.com (which I love) which offers limited choices of the last 4-5 episodes of television shows and mostly made for TV movies and documentary’s.  There is iTunes which requires you are tied to apple products to use so there is no choice in that.  iTunes also doesn’t let you really own your music, they own it and are nice enough to let you listen to it after paying them for it.  There is Netflix.com which offers more movies and entire TV seasons but the movie industry won’t let us watch anything on there until almost 6 months after it’s initially released.  So every choice we are given has a hold back to truly just being able to buy and watch what you want to when you want to and until they do that illegal downloading is going no where.

Another point to be made is these lawsuits do nothing to stop the actual distribution of movies, these movies will always be available illegally and there will always be ways you can mask yourself from ever being seen from downloading them.  The more people learn about encryption and other ways to protect their privacy on the internet the harder it will become for the RIAA or the US Copyright Group to even try to figure out who is downloading what.  Not to mention with the amount of computers in the world that are infected as bots someone could be using your connection right now to download a few movies and it looks like it’s coming straight from your house.  Some experts claim as much as 60% of computers in the US are infected with bots.  Which means that 60% of the computers can be used by other people to connect to the internet and it’s services.

So I just fail to see how the music and movie industry think investing money in a lawsuit is a better idea than investing money in the proper technology to serve us music and movies they way we want.  Blockbuster.com can manage to give me a movie let me watch it for 24 hours and give it back to them…..so why can’t all these highly paid executives at the record and movie industries come together and create a system that works in the world they live in today and not the world 20 years ago they are hoping to bully us into going back to.

Facebook in an effort to make it’s systems faster and easier to use has been doing a lot of upgrades lately.  I think overall the changes Facebook made were positive however they have just killed the game applications on their site.

If you play any of these games you have no doubt noticed the last week that the games are SOOOO slow and many people are reporting they won’t even load at all on the various fan pages.  All of the games have a disclaimer that based on the lag with the facebook systems they have turned off the various elements of these time management games such as crops withering or food spoiling to compensate for their users having such a hard time.  While being reactionary to players needs is nice this is certainly not a long term answer because the bigger problem is that these downtime issues are happening far more often and for longer periods of time.

So the reality is Facebook and Zynga have outgrown each other.  Facebook can no longer continue to use its resources wisely for its core product because so much is sucked up by applications and Zynga can no longer continue to offer its very large user base sub standard game play or it risks losing its audience.  While Facebook and Farmville were an amazing combination that boosted each companies popularity beyond anything they could have imagined the truth is each has out grown each other and it’s time for Zynga to move out and get its own place!

Let me just take a minute to explain why this is a win/win for both companies.

For Facebook they get so many resources back that will give their users a better experience and be able to keep up with their massive growth.

For Zynga it means taking back control of it’s applications and being able to give it’s user the best experience not to mention I would imagine a HUGE revenue boost since it would also have its own ad space as well as be able to market to its customers as it sees fit not whatever Facebook decides is the rule of  the week.

I would also like to mention that I think these are both really great and innovative companies and neither one has done anything “wrong” to create this problem in fact it’s just the opposite they both did so much right which led to their current inability to keep up.  So I hope they both come to the table shake hands thank each other for what each did for their own companies and break up to bring each audience a better user experience otherwise they both run the risk of their brand being tarnished if things are kept the way they are.

If you agree, post a comment…even if you don’t agree post a comment!  But I would love to hear more about other people’s experiences using these games recently.

To get a better understanding of what is different and why it’s different this blog article does a good job of breaking it down.

So now that you understand the types of attacks happening let me explain what you can do to make your computer secure so that it can’t be used to attack a company or steal credit cards or any of the other things scammers are up to.

1)  Good Antivirus – A good anti-virus program is your first line of defense it will find and detect common worms, trojans and other run of the mill viruses.  Personally I think it’s a good idea to have more than one anti-virus program since different programs seem to detect different things.  You should have one that is fully functioning and has a full time protection mode.  You should use your 2nd or 3rd for scanning only.  Doing a scan with a few different anti-viruses gives you a better chance of success in finding and deleting malicious code.  One word of advice, don’t have more than one anti-virus running in full protect mode or you will have conflicts.  If you don’t have an anti-virus program and are looking for one that is good and free I recommend Avast which has a personal version that is completely free.

2) Spyware Protection – In addition to having good anti-virus you also want a separate program that is specifically for spyware and adware.  These programs will go through your registry, cookies and other key areas to look at the files placed on your computer by websites while browsing.   Most cookies are perfectly legitimate and used by websites to keep track of your login information however others may compromise your personal information.  A good program for removing adware and spyware that is free is Ad-Aware.

3) Registry Analysis – You should also have a registry analysis tool such as HiJack This.  I cannot tell you the number of times that both my anti-virus and spyware programs found nothing and by running this program I was able to identify and clean the malware with this.  This program will give you a list of everything that happens in your registry.  This is where you will find viruses that continue to re-install themselves as well as people hijacking your browser and a lot of other nasty stuff.  The only warning I have with this program is to be sure you know what you are deleting before you do so….deleted needed registry files can really cause you problems.  If you are unsure if something is malicious or legitimate google the file name you should be able to find information on the file and it will tell you if it is legitimate or not.

4) Keep Windows Updated – Windows updates are essential to keeping your computer patched with the latest security updates.  Window is VERY vulnerable and can allow attacks and infections from a ton of different angles.  These security breaches are found all the time and patched so make sure you have window update set to automatically download and install patches.  If you would prefer to see what windows is installing first then have it automatically download the updates and then ask you to install them.  This will also avoid your computer being rebooted while it may be working on a task.

So those are the basics.  Nothing is 100% but keeping up with these steps as part of your computer maintenance routine will give you the best possible chance of your computer not being used in a cyber attack.

Many others on Twitter were reporting outages of the online banking center as well as issues with ATM machines either not working at all or not crediting deposits made.  In addition to that there was much news about the Bank of America employee bonuses handed out today.  To be honest this all makes me a little nervous.  I am wondering is Bank of America so inept it can’t keep it’s web server running or is one of the biggest banks in the country being attacked?

Well Bank of America is very active on twitter and tries to deal with customer service issues through it’s @BofA-Help handle so I decided to check there.  Nothing except a page full of the customary “@UNHAPPYCUSTOMER I work for Bank of America. Please let me know if you would like to discuss any account concerns.^nc”  Now maybe Bank of America Tweet staff is unaware but this tool can also be used to convey information and not just try to stop people from bad mouthing your brand.  A simple tweet saying “We know there is a problem we are working to resolve it” would go a long way.

So as of this moment, the site is still not up no one knows if Bank of America is being attacked or have left the building permanently.  And apparently they are in no hurry to tell us.

I will update this post throughout the day if I find more information through Twitter which is the only place there seems to be any information circulating at this time.  I have sent a message directly to Bank of America on Twitter as of yet no response.

****UPDATE****

Got the following Tweet from BofA_help:  The weird thing is now all the standard replies have changed to this reply…starting to wonder if BofA_help are bots!  (Either way, hope it is resolved quickly)

@postsalot We are aware of the issue and working to have it resolved as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.

****UPDATE****

Comment #6 may be of help to many of you.  I was able to login it took about  5 minutes for my account data to show up but it did.  And I was able to confirm I do still have a balance at Bank of America

****3:19 CST, site still down.  A blog post with a more technical analysis of what might be going on here.

****8:26 CST site is back up.  Bank of America issued the following statement.

“Bank of America spokesman TJ Crawford said the company had ruled out a cyber attack, but was still trying to identify the cause. “Some customers are having intermittent issues accessing the site,” Crawford said.

Many Bank of America customers were unable to access their accounts online Friday when the bank suffered a major Internet outage. The main web site of the country’s largest bank was only available to about 20 percent of customers in cities across the country as of 5 pm., according to a prominent Internet monitoring firm.”

Hmmm, so since when is 80% of your customers “some customers” 80% seems high to say some I think I would use the word most.  It will be interesting to see the fall out in the next few days twitter, blogs and other places on the net were filled today with people saying they were moving their money to other banks.  I think if Bank of America continues to take the stance that nothing happened and not make some statement more than they have they are going to have a hard time keeping their cusomters willing to trust them enough with their money.

Personally, I have banked with Bank of America for 10 years and even before today lately I have considered moving to a local bank or credit union.  For me at least today’s events have sealed the deal.

We will probably never be told the truth about what happened today but what I think we can be confident about is that whatever it was it wasn’t something simple.  It was not a simple hardware failure I don’t even think it was a simple as a DDOS attack it was something that stopped what is probably a very well staffed and educated IT team dead in their tracks for almost 7 hours.  Bank of America has a big infastructure so to believe they don’t have all the random run of the day issues covered over and over by redudancy would be naive.    So the thing that caused the outage today was something not normal.

Anyway, thanks to all of you who followed my blog during the day it was nice to get so many comments and personal messages from you guys!  I am done with what was the great Bank of America outage of 2010!

The reason is simple.  Big media has still yet to accept their business model will stop failing when they give us what we want the way we want it.  Television, Radio and Newspapers have all been hit with huge losses in the last few years.  The reason for each is the same the internet.  Audiences have diminished and ad revenues and jobs have been lost right along with it.  But I think what has really happened to big media is they have failed to seize a huge opportunity by being scared of change.

When Newsday launched this big plan to charge for news Rupert Murdoch went so far as to say that he was going to shut down Google from taking their content for free when speaking about Google indexing his content in their search results.  The problem with this kind of short sightedness is that he failed to recognize that if Google doesn’t know you exist….you basically don’t.  No matter how people feel about Google it has become home base for basically anything we do in our lives.  So if you choose to stop Google from indexing you, you have just told a large part of the population I have no interest in you knowing about my business and with so many choices out there it’s an easier choice for the consumer to just say next.

The other thing I think they failed to really think through is exactly what their product is it is essentially just information.  Information is available everywhere these days in fact it’s to the point where we are on information overload.  We have news sites, cable shows, network news, local news, bloggers, i-reporters, John Stewart and 800 other ways we get the news shoved at us daily.  So the reality is there is just nothing in this day and age that Newsday.com will cover that a ton of other people won’t as well.  For any given subject there are tons of articles out there that give any point of view so why would anyone pay Newsday.com $5 a week just to hear another one?

The moral of the story is big media has to give up the fight at somepoint if they want their audience back.  They have to start providing content the way we choose to receive it and the sooner they do the sooner they can get back to making money.  Big media has lived in a world of little to no competition for a long time and they have to change a lot of things in a big way to compete it is still yet to be seen if that will happen or if our grand kids will be asking what TV was and what a newspaper is.

I think this has a really big impact that people may not realize.  If you look in the papers you see a lot of talk of the wars on the ground or the war on drugs or the war on terrorism….not many people cover the cyber wars but it is happening.  And like many other things the longer we don’t focus on fixing it it will become more sophisticated and even more sensitive information will fall into the hands of people we don’t want it too.

There are quite a few countries that basically have government subsidized spam and phishing operations.  Internet scams, hacks and attacks are becoming a huge international market and it effects us all.  Today Google took a very public and direct stand against that and for that they should be commended.

They also mention in the blog post how their employees in China are completely unaware of the decision to be made and it will be made primarily by US executives as to try to ease any pressure that thier china based employees may incur.

It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out when Google makes their final decision about operating in China either way what Google did today is BIG and important to all of us.