Neologism: Pharming Today

The ultimate geek...

Is one who thinks it's really funny to use 'ph' instead of 'f'.

Met a techie once who called himself Phrank as his colleagues called him that and he thought it was 'neat'. How sad is that?
 
Re: The ultimate geek...

Reminds me of the story of the super-dooper Washing power that had just been invented.

All the sales people were asked to come up with a new name and slogan for the stuff.

Eventually, after many names & slogans had been rejected, one young bright spark came up with the name "Phuck"

"Ok then, what's your slogan?", he was asked

"If Daz won't brighten it, and Persil won't whiten it, then Phuck it"
 
Can't say I'd ever heard of pharming until I read an article about it in the FT this week. It seems that unlike phishing where the victim volunteers personal information to a fraudulant website, pharmers seem to leave an electronic seed implanted in your computer or DNS server that then redirects sensitive info intended for, say, your bank, to a gang of crooks who then empty your accounts.

I'm sure BrendanS or someone else can provide a more cogent and accurate technical explanation.
 
Joking apart, I keep getting these things called cookies on my computer and they seem to come from everywhere you go on the internet. Are they bad and should they be got rid of? Question for BrendanS although I have noticed that there is somebody who is (unsuccessfully) challenging his computer supremacy on this forum. I don't want to set off another one of those virtual rows.
 
Cookies are absolutely essential to the way the internet is currently used, and there is little chance of getting rid of them. They usually store log in information so you don't have to log into favourties sites each time, or personal preference, or ways to identify your personal preferences.

This is all fine, but some cookies are misused, and this is what people can get het up about. This latter type of cookie is classed as malware, and will be removed by most popular spyware programmes.

PS, there are plenty of people on here with excellent computer backgrounds
 
Thanks for that. I have now trawled through all the cookies on my browser and found many that, as you say, suggest they are for storing preferences eg those from ybw.com. On the other hand, there also some from sources such as adclick.net and doubleclick.net which would suggest they may be more to do with commercial things. It seems to me that one has to go through the list periodically and delete those that don't obviously appear to be doing soemthing for me rather than for somebody else.
Thanks again.
 
spyware such as ad-aware will clean out cookies like adclick for you, without you having to trawl through the list manually.

The alternative is to use ccleaner, and enter into the ccleaner preferences all the useful cookies like ybw you want to keep, and it will delete all the rest
 
If you delete all cookies, the effect will be that for example on YBW you will lose your automatic sign-in. As soon as you log in again, that will be stored and you're back in business. It's a quick-and-dirty method but fairly painless.
 
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