My Computer has really been acting strange lately. I have an external Hard drive that has four activation lights on top of it. Whenever I access it, these lights will start to blink in a rotating fashion. I've noticed that the past few nights, these lights tend to come on and begin blinking all by themselves. This has given me reaon to believe that someone out there has copied my IP Adress, found a way around my firewall, and is accessing my hard drive. Am I correct to assume this
I doubt it. It's easy enough to check though. Unplug the internet connection and see if it keeps happening.
Hate to break it to you, but you ain't really important enough for someone to poke around on your computer. Those days are long-gone. Rather, I'd expect that your OS is doing some indexing (yes, XP does this too), or that some bit of your own software is hitting it - virus scans, for example, are frequently set to run at night.
Not quite Kyle, there is still the issue of the RIAA and the MPAA and their respective equivilents from around the world still trying to poke around on our PC's. Not that that is the issue here of course, but if you wanna protect yourself, grab a copy of protowall (google it) to stop these (and others) bastards invading your privacy.
If its an outside source contacting the computer then spam and malware is a bout a million times more likely than the govt or the RIAA/MPAA. Something like 40% of the worlds computers are infected with files that can send spam remotely
Yep thats true as well Dan, spam and malware are a bigger threat. But my firewall is blocking (using the protowall blocklist on the firewall since protowall isn't yet vista compatable) hundreds of connection attempts by the RIAA/MPAA on a daily basis.
I'd be interested in being able to establish a list of attempts if applicable to my shared folders between my computers, that is since a couple of the shares are internet based. I wonder if they can access my system like through my WM player. On a side note, I refuse to use anything Real Media produced period.
Unfortunately, I haven't myself figured out anything that specific. But Protowall is specific enough to be able to tell you the ip range of the intrusion as well as the name of the source, which it knows from its updatable IP list. It simply tells you that a connection attempt has been made (from that particular source) and that it has been blocked. It also tells you that a connection attempt to a source has been made from your pc, but doesn't specify what program made the connection attempt. The info is time stamped as well if I remember right, so if you remember when you opened a certain application you can usually make a good guess as to which app triggered that connection attempt. With WMP, under options>Privacy, I normally leave every single box there unticked just to make me feel a bit safer. As for RM, I won't have that crap anywhere near my PC nor for that matter quicktime. The best player I have used is the GOM player, it has most of the codecs that are commonly used (divx etc) built in and any video file with a codec that it doesn't recignise will make the program check its online server for the relevant codec. No more downloading all sorts of codec packs and messing about, hardly troubles my PC's resources and it costs nothing.
Well, my player is set to retrive info on a disc I put in, but that's about it aside of having license aquisition checked. If I hit "album info" it tells me I must reset the cookies so I'm assuming it's third party blocked. I'll check out protowall for grins. Thanks.
Do not be alarmed by the seemingly random blinking lights, human. We are only using your computer to organize a friendly visit to your planet "earth" in the near future. Our changes to your Earth society will only improve your primitive species as a whole.
