Hey Ed - Welcome to the Wonderful World of Internet Paranoia! After having a "worm" zip right past my antivirus program last Fall and start chewing up my hard drive, I am now trying to be very-y-y careful. Since I hooked up to cable broadband several months ago, my cable modem goes through my router first (hardware firewall) before my PC. Then I have a software firewall on the PC. Further, I now scan all my emails on my ISP's server before I download them to my computer. How's that for paranoia? The only email I really trust is from TechNet because Keach and the IPC folks do a good job of screening. Some of these hackers out there are really smart. Oh, by the way, a lot of those little spyware programs can be cleaned off your system using Ad-Aware from lavasoft.com. It's freeware and does a really decent job of finding those little "unknown" spy programs (not cookies) that get downloaded to your machine without your knowledge. Ed/ Edward J. Valentine Electronics Manufacturing Solutions 5702 Myakka Court Raleigh, NC USA 27616-3243 Phone: (919) 270-5145 [log in to unmask] www.ems-consulting.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Ed Popielarski To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 9:59 AM Subject: [TN] Quickbooks and Big Brother Hi everyone, I was working near my laptop yesterday when I noticed the "in use" light on my telephone line 2 was on. As I was looking at it, it went off and I wondered what exactly just happened? I discovered a sub-program in Quickbooks called QBDAgent that had executed a call through the modem without "asking me"! I looked it up using Yahoo and read commentary from several IT types that this program "phone's home" to report itself to it's makers, apparently to impede software piracy. There is a .log file associated that records it's activities which can only be accessed by turning off the QBDAgent executable via ctl/alt/del. The only way to de-activate the .exe is to use a firewall or pull the modem plug. I'm not a particularly paranoid type, but it unnerves me that my accounting software is under someone else's control! Any comments or suggestions are encouraged. Regards, Ed Popielarski QTA Machine 10 Mc Laren, Ste D Irvine, Ca. 92618 Phone:949-581-6601 Fax: 949-581-2448 Cel: 949-337-2578 WWW.QTA.NET --------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8e To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL) To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 ----------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------- Technet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8e To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL) To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5315 -----------------------------------------------------