Month: January 2016

Benefits of fasting

Fasting. People have been doing it from the beginning of time.

Saves money, and it’s good for you.

I took to fasting when I used to live on my own.

Survival of the fittest

There is scientific evidence to suggest that fasting is better for you neurologically, and physically.

Our cells are designed in such a way that, the bad cells get digested by the good after a period of fasting to make up the calorific shortfall.

Like a survival of the fittest.

Defect cells are just ironed out.

I’ve no doubt that the body builds up a cache of toxins from food, drink and any other alcohol and drugs, which is stored in the fat of the body.

Getting rid of this every once in a while regenerates the body, and allows it to start afresh.

21 days

When I was in France, I didn’t eat for 21 days.

That’s pretty extreme, and I ended up very skinny.

Michael Tyler
Skinny me

What it did do is cleared my guts, metabolism and body of any fat or excess, and wiped the slate clean.

I feel better for that.

Here’s the article Continue reading “Benefits of fasting”

China: Wisdom and leadership with a friendly face

[icopyright_horizontal_toolbar]

So…

Read this article about us all holding on to our knickers with regard to the China situation.

The author cites the cause of the problem being the shift toward free-market.

The problems in liberalization of capital markets are causing instability.

China is a fine place to invest after all.Chinese Gambling

Having lived there, I know many of the problems first hand.

Confucian bureaucracy

Yes, China is a bureaucracy.

And as they say, the bureaucracy feeds the bureaucracy. Making the bureaucracy feed the capitalism may cause problems.

Not just, as the author suggests, in the logistical, functional, and organisational aspects, but also in cultural. And China has 5,000 years of culture as any Chinese man will be more than willing to tell you.

Making a cultural shift from Communist Bureaucracy to Free market capitalism takes time. Maybe a generation. Maybe longer. Continue reading “China: Wisdom and leadership with a friendly face”

Cryptowall: Remove and delete encrypted files

These are the steps I’m going to be taking to remove the Cryptowall Virus and restoring my files to their previous state.

At present, I have the following means at my disposal.

  • System restore – Including restore shadow volumes
  • Online backups – Onedrive/Google drive
  • Offline backups – Solid state drive backups

Using a combination of these, I intend to restore my files to their previous state.

Step 1: Remove Virus:

To get things rolling again, and make my computer safe to use. I’ve to rid myself of the Virus.

Boot-time scan for viruses

Boot-time Scan

Most anti-virus software worth their salt have this option.

Has to be a boot-time scan to unsure your operating system and the connected files are not affected.

For my computer, which has 220GB used on the hard drive, it took around 3 hours.

Malware Bytes Scan

Malware bytes seeks those pieces of not-yet-virus material.

If you want to prevent your computer from getting the infection again, you need to run this.

JRT Scan

Junkware Removal Tool, or JRT.

Similar to Malware bytes, it simply insures that files associated with dubious activities won’t infect your machine in the future.

You may get some false positives with this, so not everyone likes to use it…

These steps are essential to ensure you have a clean system. Continue reading “Cryptowall: Remove and delete encrypted files”

Cryptowall takes over my computer

So….. Turns out the NHS, Fedex and a number of other companies and organisations have been hit by this same Ransomwear virus.

According to Avast, (who I use), there have been infections in 99 countries in the last 2 days.

Apparently, the NHS are still using windows XP on their computers. A 12 year old operating system.

Windows stopped patching XP on April 8, 2014.

That means it’s a sitting duck for systems using XP.

On my cloudflare account, most attacks come from XP computers, simply because they are so easy to commandeer and bend to the wills of evil hackers.

How to fight ransomwear?

If you, like I, did a search on this, “how to fight ransomwear, get rid of it from your computer”, it turns up a number of companies claiming to be able to ‘fix’ your system for exorbitant amounts of money.

I’ve done my own guide to removing ransomwear from your computer.

It works pretty well.

It worked when I got randsomwear, and you can find it here. My guide to removing ransomwear from your computer.

Below.

Article.

Cryptowall, ever heard of it? I hadn’t until tonight…

…. Watching Lost this evening… I went to open up VLC player, and I noticed that it was taking a long time to start-up.

Opening Process Explorer, I saw the SVChost, (a common windows task), in explorer.exe taking up around 4% of CPU.

Thought nothing of it. I know SVChost runs in the background carrying out important tasks for the operating system.

Watched Lost, (Series 4 Episode 8, ‘The shape of things to come’), as I finished, this PNG was displaying on Windows picture preview.Crytowall Ransomwear

I’d not opened this file. It was telling me Cryptowall, whilst I was watching lost, had encrypted all the files on my computer using RSA-2048 encryption.

My Pictures Library now looks like this…. Continue reading “Cryptowall takes over my computer”