Quote from Richard on Oct 19^th, 2007, 10:12am:

 
FireFox has gotten popular enough that hackers are starting to target it, too. But, it's a lot less prone to that stuff than Internet Explorer. That's just one of those things we internet geeks have to watch for, these days.

I have a new wrinkle to add. As of this morning, when I booted up the laptop and automatically received the latest Symantec virus signatures, I get a warning like the following. It happens as soon as I open the forum's main page or an individual posting.

Ditto.....

Quote from FooRider on Oct 31^st, 2007, 5:07pm:

 
Bingo. That's Symantec's (Norton's - it's all the same) specialty: falsely reporting viruses. But they are so big, it will probably be YABB (our forum software) who makes a change on the next version so that Symantec won't report a virus.
 
It's Symantec's email thing that really drives me crazy. The vast majority of viruses (and falsely reported ones) are sent in email. Symantec sends a reply to every return email address for every email virus it reports. Well, guess what? Virus authors don't use their own email address as a return address (big surprise there, huh). They spoof other return addresses (you can put any return address you like when you send email). My main email address has been sitting on my website since 1996, so it is a favorite address for virus authors to spoof. Whenever there really is a new virus going around by email, I get hundreds or even thousands of emails a day, most of them generated and sent by Symantec. The overloaded email servers that Symantec causes always end up doing more damage across the internet than the actual virus did.
 
So, don't get me started on Symantec. When I first booted my new laptop a few weeks ago, it took me less than three minutes to get Symantec, which had come with it, uninstalled. IMHO, the two worst major software programs in the world are (1) Norton Anti Virus and (1A) Microsoft Internet Explorer. I strongly recommend against using either.
 
Ok, I feel better. I try not to rant too often on this forum, but I guess that counts as one.
 

Maybe, but I did a bit of Googling around today and found that others have experienced similar problems with web pages:
 
http://www.castlecops.com/t160127-Downloader_Virus.html
 
I don't know how someone could have hacked into Perl-generated pages, but it might be worth Bud taking a look.

Now that I think about it, maybe it's time to move rbent to its own domain. A domain and hosting is pretty cheap. Surely, between all of us, we could raise enough money to pay for a domain and hosting. I could make the default files in the rbent folder on this site redirect to the new site, so everyone's old bookmarks would still work. What domain should we get? rbent.us? rbent.info?

I've sent you my email address. If there was something about YABB's code in the rbent folder causing the warnings, I would think there would be other YABB forums generating virus warnings, and I haven't found any evidence of that. We're using strictly the original YABB software; I've changed nothing except for adding the rbent logo.
 
rbentonline.org would work. I'm thinking that my hosting allows a second domain name on the same hosting account. I'll check into that. That might be an extremely cheap way to give rbent its own home.

I'll chip in what I can towards RBENTOnline.com, or .org, or whatever........    Pain in the butt modern technology.....