Grandad uses Twitter occasionally, as do I.

He had the gross misfortune to somehow get tangled with a thing called Mobsterworld.

Having got his password they then proceeded to bombard all his followers with DMs [Direct Messages] purporting to come from him, and inviting everyone to join.

Needless to say, his followers were not too happy.

I changed his password.  That was no problem.

However, this Mobsterworld crowd weren’t too happy as they were trying to access his account using his old password, and they were trying repeatedly.  As a result, the account was locked by Twitter, due to the number of unsuccessful atempts.

So here is a warning to all Twitterers –

Under no circumstances, join Mobsterworld.  Do not be taken in by ANY DM inviting you to join a Mafia gang.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Lately, I have been experiencing a very strange problem.

I can be quite fast on the keyboard, and I tend not to look at the screen while typing.  So I bang a couple of sentences into the comment fields of my site, and then look at the screen only to find my entire effort there only in reverse.

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Just out of interest, I did a search on Google and found that I am not alone.

Various theories are put forward, with most suggesting a virus.  I can understand that as it is a typical manifestation of some of the older viruses (viri?).  No.  It’s not a virus.

Others have suggested an operation system, but it appears on several systems by all accounts.

Quite a few have suggested the keyboard which is obviously not the case.

The one common thread seems to be Firefox.

I have checked though quite a few inane suggestions, some misguided ones and quite a few who just suggest closing and reopening Firefox.  The only reply that seems to make any sense is that it’s a Java problem?

My Java is as up to date as it can be, so I am a tad suspicious of this, but it remains the only plausible explanation.

Has anyone else experienced this?

I get a couple of computer magazines on a monthly basis.  I may revise that now that the business is gone, but in the meantime…………

The last edition I received of one of the magazines came with a DVD attached with a three month trial of Kaspersky Internet Security.  It seemed like a reasonable package, and with three months to run, I felt I had nothing to lose.

I installed it, and it rather high headedly insisted that I remove my current antivirus package and switch off all firewalls.  I was prepared to live with that however, and let it do its business.

I must say, I was very impressed with its features.  It seemed to take a belt and braces approach which is not a bad thing.  For example, it would flash up any arriving email for my approval, and even then it would scan it.  If it was suspicious of any (legitimate) program, it gave the option of running that program in a sandbox, thus quarantining it.

The more I looked into the program, the more I liked what I saw and decided that I would let it run its three months, and then I would subscribe.

The next day, I went to open an application (I think it was Word) and it took an age.  I’m talking maybe five minutes to open.  This concerned me, and my first thought was that something had gone wrong and an errant program somewhere was hogging too much memory, despite all the warning lights being in the green.  I decided to reboot anyway, as that can’t do any harm.

Rebooting took about ten minutes.  This is a fairly clean machine with 2Gb of memory and a duel core Pentium, so rebooting should be slightly faster than that?

My next thought was that a virus had crept in while Kaspersky was installing.  I fired up a full scan.

Twenty minutes later, the scan gauge still showed 0% progress.

For the next few hours, work on the machine was next to impossible.  Simple operations, like opening Firefox took maybe ten minutes.  Something somewhere was obviously preventing anything from running.  By now I was getting worried.

I began to get a wee bit suspicious about my new found friend Kaspersky, so I removed it.

I reinstalled my old antivirus of choice – Avast, and rebooted.

It flew through the process!  Programmes loaded like lightening and all was well with the world again.

My machine has been running very happily since. 

My conclusions?

Alwil’s Avast – Thumbs up.  I’m sorry I doubted you.

Kaspersky – Excellent CD for playing Frisbee with the dog..