New virus targets industry

Scary stuff, hopefully a virus does not get into my milling machine. At least my mill does not run on Windows.

Windows or not, if your router / firewall doesn't map any ports to your CNC control PC and you don't do any risky stuff on that PC like music pirating, etc. you should have a very low risk of getting a virus on your CNC control.

I've had many Windows PCs for years and have never had a virus on any of them, including several that are online and on net 24x365. I always wonder what dumb-ass stuff these people who constantly get viruses on their PCs are doing.

"Pete C." fired this volley in news:4c45af39$0$5333 $ snipped-for-privacy@unlimited.usenetmonster.com:

I can't imagine, either, but I had one in the office here for about five years.

We have the normal, irritating, and not-so-effective Norton on all computers. We have a FireBox Edge, kept up to date.

Nobody ever got a bug over five years, except this one woman, who got one about every week. Thank goodness she wasn't a member of the office network, just had access to internet and email.

LLoyd

I do not do music pirating from my mill, this would be a bit much (and the milling PC has very little memory). I do music pirating from my basement desktop/server. From there, the music is shared with the rest of the house (including the mill) via NFS.

I think that they visit websites.

I don't pirate music at all. I'm not particularly music oriented, and these days you can legitimately buy the individual tracks you may want for $1 which is fine with me.

The funny thing is that I visit plenty of websites as well and still never get any viruses. Either they are visiting some really strange websites, or their primary infection route is from stupidly opening SPAM emails.

They run games they download on the web. I know, my kids do all that stuff, and their PC slowly ground to a halt, with about 7 custom toolbars loaded on Firefox.

I finally put my foot down and installed Linux on their computer, and have had much less trouble.

Jon

Cheers! Rich

Only for those who are truly too stupid to own a computer.

I spent most of the past week teaching video editing on a computer. A brand new eight core 3 GHz Windows 7 system with 8 GB of RAM and a 1 TB hard drive. It assembled the final cut of an 18:30 minute video in just over two minutes, using AVS4You. I didn't like the trackball they had, so they bought a 'Griffin Powermate' from Griffin for $45, including shipping.

It replaces the usual video edit 'jog wheel', but is programmable to emulate up to six keyboard commands. I set it to move the video about half a second per rotation to find the edit points. It was almost as nice as the professional 1" VTR editing system I last used, at more than $100,000 lower cost. It consisted of three 1" R-R Sony VTRs with digital TBCs, one Umatic recorder, four custom interface boxes and the edit controller. That filled most of three 6' relay racks.

That video will be used at trade shows for the next five weeks, before the next project. It will be shown on a Vista based laptop, in MP4 format.

It took less than a half hour from the time the computer's box was opened, till it was ready to edit video. How long would it take you to find all the linux crap, compile a kernel and set up a system?

I also created the brochure they will be handing out. Part was done with GIMP, the rest on the newest version of Paint. It was printed out on a brand new HP CP2025n color laser printer with a built in duplexer. It has both USB and ethernet interfaces built in. It prints 21 pages a minute in black or color.

I've seen other computer based video editors that would have taken days to render that edit. I'm happy that I never had to use one. :)