A firewall is one of the ways in which you can protect your computer from unauthorised access from other people. Ideally you want a firewall that both blocks incoming access except as responses to outgoing requests and which also blocks outgoing requests except from those programs you specifically authorise to make such requests. This latter [...]

Yesterday my ISP blocked my internet access for a couple of hours when their automated spam blocker somehow misidentified my connection as having been sending spam. The ISP did not of course accuse me of sending spam, their block page suggested that it would have actually been caused by a virus or spyware having got [...]

After the adventures that I had a few weeks ago trying to install XAMPP and WAMP5, having to manually edit the config files, and still not being able to get either of them to work, I decided to have another go - this time with separate installs for Apache, PHP, mySQL, and phpMyAdmin.
The individual installs [...]

After spending several hours attempting to track down and fix all the errors in the various config files that XAMPP managed to totally stuff up (by inserting \ insead of / and leaving off drive letters), I still kept getting errors all over the place when trying to access web pages I copied there. As [...]