If you've received an email with a link to what's promoted as a dancing Halloween skeleton - don't download it. The link is actually a malicious piece of software, usually labeled something like halloween.exe that will compromise your computer and turn it into a zombie that's part of the criminal computer network controlled by the so-called Storm gang.

So far today, I've tracked this software to ISP's all over the world, including Comporium of Rock Hill, South Carolina, the TPL network in Poland, Bezeq International in Israel, Charter Communications in the US, etc.

If you get an email from someone you've never heard of pointing to a link that looks like this - http://222.256.300.104/ - don't click on it. (And that isn't a real Internet address - but it's formatted similarly to those in the malicious emails for demonstration purposes.)

Download the fake treat, and you could find that any and all information you have on or type into your computer is being sent behind the scenes to criminals - information like online banking passwords, email addresses of family and friends, personal documents and so on.

Cheers,
George
justFRED.ca

With poppies appearing on lapels everywhere at this time of year, it's customary to pay tribute to the veterans who fought and died in the name of democracy and freedom.

One of the characteristics of a democracy, of course, is what we call freedom of the press. We tend to look down on political regimes where the media are throttled.

Yet there's been an encroachment in Canada on this fundamental and vitally important characteristic of a democracy: media consolidation.

Welcome to New Brunswick, where media consolidation is more pervasive - according to a co-author of the Senate's 2006 report on the issue - than anywhere else in the developed world.

Three years ago, the province's francophone journalists association hosted a series of workshops on the topic from a global, regional, national and provincial perspective.

At the last workshop, two senior staff members of the Irving media empire (Jonathan Franklin and Lisa Hrabluk) publicly proclaimed that they were given unfettered freedom to report as they saw fit and that they'd never had so much as a hint of interference from their bosses.

Yet as I pointed out to the gathering, their newspaper - The Telegraph Journal - had obviously self-censored the agenda of the very workshop they led.

In the paper that day, the event was portrayed as a series of four workshops: Media Consolidation Around the World, Media Consolidation in North America, Media Consolidation in Canada and The New Brunswick Experience. As you might have guessed, that wasn't the title of the fourth workshop, despite what the TJ would have you believe. And I didn't believe a word of what they said about their freedom to report.

But that's small potatoes to what the Irving media empire is trying to do in Woodstock, from the brutish application of a rare private search warrant that allowed the Irving contractors to paw through a woman's lingerie, to the choir-like rants in their company newspapers that a tiny new publication in a small town threatens their corporate existence.

It's not like some third world country where they'll shoot you or toss you in jail - we frown on that stuff in a democracy like Canada. They'll just starve you out, threaten you with their legion of lawyers, or use their newspapers to try to destroy your reputation. Take a look at what they tried to do to the late Louis J. Robichaud.

So this November 11th when I'm standing with the rest of the beneficiaries of those brave souls who put their lives on the line so we could live in a democracy like Canada, I'm going to be thinking about the importance of a free press and how, maybe, it's high time we started fighting to keep it.

And yes, Senator Fraser, it's also high time our federal government took a very good look at the media consolidation we have in New Brunswick and did something about it. It's hardly new, but it is getting progressively worse and it's just plain bad for democracy, something a lot of Canadians died to preserve.

Cheers,
George
justFRED.ca

Our Blogs went down on Sunday night. Here's what happened:

We've been hosting our blogs at a company called Towerhost for nearly a year. They were recently acquired by Hostgator. And thanks to what Hostgator claims was a 90-second problem late Sunday, they suspended our blog account: no warning, no discussion, but with a suggestion that we could fix the problem by simply paying them more money.

That looks and smells like hijacking.

Thanks to Stephen, the blogs were moved to a more customer-friendly hosting company on Monday morning and were back in operation by lunch time.

Our apologies for any inconvenience.

Cheers,
George
justFRED.ca

And the winner is: zoya_99_2000

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Think you've carved the perfect Halloween pumpkin? Send us your pic - photos@justFRED.ca - or post it to our Facebook wall. We'll choose the entry we like best and the winner will get a $20 gift certificate for dinner at The Grill on York.

We'll announce the winner on Halloween...so get out the knives.

Cheers,

George

justFRED.ca

The winner is: gidjan

And the correct answer: 30 years

Thanks to everyone who took part, and thanks to the New Brunswick Chinese Cultural Association for providing the tickets.

Cheers,

George

justFRED.ca

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The New Brunswick Chinese Cultural Association is sponsoring a 'Chinese Cultural Spectacular' at The Playhouse on Saturday to celebrate how many years of operation?

Post your answer http://justfred.ca/contests.php">here and you could win a pair of tickets to the show.

Winner announced on Friday.

Cheers,

George

justFRED.ca

We don't have a winner yet because no one was able to identify the change we asked you to spot: small on the outside, but big on the inside. And we didn't provide just two clues, but there were actually three and one of them was hidden in plain sight. Here's that third clue, showing the before and after. Get it right - how could you not? - and your name goes into the hat for the FREE pizza from Pizza Shack.

Before:

Cheers,
George
justFRED.ca

After:

Cheers,
George
justFRED Inc.

Yes, we have. Here's a clue:It's a very minor change on the surface, but it's a major change behind the scenes.

Combine this with the clue in today's justFRED-O-GRAM and you could be enjoying a FREE pizza from Pizza Shack. Winner announced on Wednesday morning.

Cheers,
George
justFRED.ca

Finding photos on justFRED.ca has been a struggle for many of our visitors...even if you know when the photos were added to the site.

We've been doing lookups ourselves, and sending out the links to the appropriate galleries, but that's not an ideal situation: it's frustrating for you and it's time consuming for us.

Over the weekend, we made several breakthroughs in resolving the situation and, as you can see tonight, have implemented a solution that's a huge improvement over the status quo: a drop down on every page in the thumbnail galleries that gives you the same tools for finding images that we've had inside the administration area.

Thanks to Stephen and Mila for figuring out and implementing these improvements. We do hope it helps.

And thanks to your, our loyal visitors, for being patient with us while we fixed this persistent problem.

Cheers,
George
justFRED.ca

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Another 20 degree day in Fredericton - a full two-thirds of the way through October - the leaves are still on the trees (although the colors are utterly spectacular) and we're still seeing what most of us consider summer veggies on sale at the market.

It's too easy to be flippant about what some call the good news about global warming - unless you note that much of the southeastern US is suffering the worst drought in living memory.

Meantime, a note arrived overnight encouraging us all to put more effort into reducing our use - and waste - of paper. Seems paper production globally is a major user of fresh water. Worth thinking about. And another reason to take our media online...where every bit can be recycled without chewing up any more trees.

Cheers,
George
justFRED.ca

It seems like only yesterday when we were anxiously awaiting news that we'd passed the five million page mark since justFRED.ca went live in November of 2006. And now we're watching the counter rapidly approach 6,000,000...

In fact, unless something goes haywire with our web servers - which has happened before - we'll get there sometime Saturday. And that means we'll have hit another significant figure: a million pages served in a single month.

So why the obsession with numbers? It's all about survival.

As anyone who's spent any amount of time on site knows, we provide our photos and videos and calendar entries and forums and blogs and contents and business directory for free to our visitors. No subscriptions, no buying your daily copy at the corner store, and no filling up the recycling bin.

FREE, FREE, FREE...and nothing gone to waste.

So the numbers are how we convince advertisers and sponsors that we're worth supporting. They're the people who give us the pizzas and ballcaps and MP3 players and sweatshirts and event tickets and CD's to give away. They're the ones who pay for the one-banner-ad-per-page commercial messages that make this happen.

In nearly every case, they're locally owned and operated businesses, just like us.

So as we near another important milestone, we'd like to say Thank You! to our loyal visitors for showing your support of justFRED.ca by visiting us often, saying Cheese! for our cameras, and telling your friends about our window on Fredericton...and to our advertisers and sponsors for recognizing the value of all of those visits.

Cheers,
George
justFRED.ca