From this part of the world where we are, it seems that Facebook has gone down. This will be its second outage in this month, the first on August 7th which was attributed to massive DOS (Denial-of-Service) attacks which also brought down the Twitter network.
This time, no clue yet on the cause of the outage. Here’s one the first site to report on the outage, and its advice for Netizens starved of their usual Facebook fix.
Recently due to a weird problem of the mouse cursor moving by itself on et’s laptop, we installed the program Spyware Terminator from download.com.
Initially things were ok. No spyware found. Only thing was the irritating alert notices for even the most innocent network activity such as when BOINC initiates some network activity.
However things turned nasty last week. Spyware Terminator gave its usual cryptic alert notice of a potential change related to winsock. Not sure of what the alert is all about, she proceeded to allow Spyware Terminator to Deny the action. That’s when all hell broke loose.
Firstly VNC went down. Then all browsers became useless. Followed by Skype. Lastly, even the network icon at the Taskbar has an ‘X’ to it. Total and complete network loss…
Somehow there was no way to undo the action done by Spyware Terminator even though their website mentioned that it can be done.
Performing System Restore did not help solve the issue as the message was that System Restore could not restore the system completely. Hmm ….. which renders the System Restore a rather moot Windows feature then.
Winsock has a really wide reach. With winsock blocked/disabled by Spyware Terminator, most things just refuse to work. Almost all Microsoft-related programs can’t start, and that includes Help and diagnostic. Even the Hewlett Packard PC Advisor couldn’t start.
In the end, she found one thing that worked. The solution was to reset the winsock.
With the command line netsh winsock reset , everything miraculously resumed service! The command was found at this page. It only works with Vista and XP SP2. Others will need extra steps in order to achieve the same effect.
So with all that she had been through, the first thing to do after the system had returned to normal was to uninstall the Spyware Terminator. ‘Nuff said on it. Bye bye Spyware Terminator.
