Scoble: Why geek get togethers are important (security security security)

Scoble reports on some security discussions he’s had recently:

Getting together with other geeks has been part of this industry for more than 30 years and it's no less important today than it was back in the mid 70s when Wozniak showed his Apple I to the Homebrew Computer Society in Silicon Valley.

Today I had another example of that.

They are a way to warn companies and insiders of things that they are doing wrong.

Several discussions today centered on phishing, spyware, malware, viruses, and worms. Dave Winer said something real important "I can't trust my computer anymore." I hope I'm quoting him correctly, but he's recently been hit with spyware and can't get rid of it. Unfortunately I didn't get a look at his computer this week, so couldn't debug it.

There’s more at:
[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Good to hear (later in the post) that Scoble’s going to stop running as Administrator. As I’ve noted repeatedly on my old blog, running as Admin is a bad idea, and it’s unnecessary if you’re running XP Pro or later, once you learn a few tricks. My fellow Microsoftie, Aaron Margosis, has a couple of tools (see PrivBar and MakeMeAdmin) that make running as a non-admin much less painful, and make it simple to get software to install to the correct profile (something that doesn’t always work the way it should with RunAs).