Lucky you last time I was faced with Conficker the company spent 3 weeks running round cleaning up all there desktops as they were using them as thin clients and the IT manager had the idea that they did not require AV installing dope!!!!

Hey, this Google Alerts thing works.

Anyway, I more or less agree with you about people getting around filters at work. You took the job of your own choice and you're getting paid to focus on work and avoid surfing YouTube, so you don't have much argument for getting around the blockers.

But students in school are another matter. They're forced to be there and they're not getting paid, so I do what I can to help them. It's hypocritical to force students to spend 8 hours a day forcing things that nobody else is required to know. If it's really important to memorize country capitals, for example, why isn't *everybody* required to do it? We talk about how important it is for citizens to be "well-rounded" and to know our "heritage", but teenagers are the only segment in society that it's actually forced on. Of course they're disadvantaged as a result, being forced to work for 8 hours a day for free. If any other group (immigrants, women, etc.) were designated as the group that was forced to learn these things, they would be at an economic disadvantage compared to everyone else as well.

Historically, teenagers have been treated much more like adults than like children, and they rose to the occasion and functioned as adults in their society. They can do it, if you don't waste all their time with busy-work.

An excellent phone (I love mine), but not without shortcomings unfortunately.

Thanks for this list of freeware, that'll go a long way towards filling some of the holes.

I just needed to complete the circle and create the social web's first perpetual motion machine. "I kid, I kid 'cause I love." Thanks for being part of the conversation. :)

So sorry, Mr. Allen! Ah, the perils of guessing! Glad to see you changed it. Easy, huh? ;-)

Thanks for your comments - as web 2.0 finds its feet, problems like this will occur with a lot of sites, and it's good to see you're proactively investigating the issue...

Just one minor point though - Ms. Allen is definitely a Mr. :-) I've updated http://www.aboutus.org/WholesaleAsia.co.uk to reflect that!

Great post, Ashley. It's easy to pull off a scam, isn't it?

My name is Ted Ernst, and I work for AboutUs. Take a look at these two pages?

http://www.aboutus.org/Client-Confirmation.com
http://www.aboutus.org/WholesaleAsia.co.uk

You'll also note that http://www.aboutus.org/Category:Online_Payments no longer contains Client-Confirmation.com

AboutUs is a community resource that's easy to edit, which is what I did to refer to your post. Anyone can do it, simply by having an account and clicking "edit." Anyone that knows about a scammer domain, or any kind of domain, can do the same.

And, you're absolutely right that people shouldn't simply believe what they're told. This applies to email, Wikipedia, blogs, Britannica and the daily news. I really appreciate your reminder!