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OK. I think this will be great news for many schools who are still clinging to Windows XP. Microsoft will keep supplying anti-malware updates to Windows XP until april 15, 2014. The March 2013 date caused an outcry among many and we've been working hard to update all the XP machines with extra RAM so they could go to Windows 7. But with the machines working so well on XP many of us wonder why we should dispose of machines that work so well especially in cash crunched times. Take your time - you've got a little longer although for us in the US if they'd go through June 2015 it means we can get 2 more school years out of XP machines. In a sign of the times, it can make all the difference between some kids using technology and some not.

Ransomware is a new kind of malware. The worst Ransomware to hit in some time is the Crypto virus. This virus encrypts your hard drive and you have to send them a $300 certificate (untraceable) so they'll give you the encryption key to decrypt your drive and get your data back. In an interesting twist, the US government disabled the servers running this ransomware scan and now all of the people with the virus have no hope of getting their decryption keys. This is another reason you should be very careful NOT to open suspicious attachments even from legitimate sounding sources. (Many of these messages appeared to be from Fedex and UPS.) The greatest internet filter ever created is the human brain. Educate teachers and others - not through fear but through a skeptical empowerment that always thinks before it clicks and especially before it downloads.

Looks like the problems many of us have been having in Firefox (last week in particular) may actually be from Microsoft? Come on !! I love firefox and don't have my students use IE for this reason (slowness, lack of ad ons, viruses, malware.) The only time I'm using Chrome now is for special webapps (Toodledo) and also Google Wave (it seems to consume any other web browser.) This ZDNET article is a follow through from Stephen Downes' amazing resource sharing blog - if you haven't subscribed, you should.

I've been playing around with Flare on my blog. 5 of the 10 top sites in social media use Flare. Here is the instruction for how to activate and use it. Oddly I got some malware alerts from Malwarebytes so although I'm using it, I'm contacting the developer to try to understand why.

If one is constantly searching for new education websites, as I am, this is a handy tool to use before opening that site.

If you use Linux because it is worry free as related to viruses - don't be caught sleeping - an infected set of Linux botnets are distributing malware, experts have discovered.