Ok, off topic, but very necessary at this point! I hope to save a lot of people on my lists the problems of contracting a virus and at the same time enlightening some of you to the how's and why's of them, along with a little of what to do with them.

The last few days there has been a rash of them coming back again, such as the Stuart Deskmate one and Melissa and Pretty Park as well. We have to watch very carefully with these as they are on the move again and moving very fast!

First of all, Rootsweb does not allow attachments to their lists, so if you get one from Rootsweb, it's not coming from Rootsweb! They get in through an attachment, then steal the address book, up to fifty names, then sends itself to all of those and hoping that some of those will open it and do the same thing again and again! So just because it came from an address that is listed, does not mean that is where it came from.

The last one that I had personal dealings with, came from France and was bounced off of two different satellites to an address in Des Moines, so don't jump to conclusions that so and so sent me a virus. As a general rule, do not open attachments unless you know the person that sent it to you and you know in advance that they are going to send you one. If you are a brave soul, then at least make sure that you have an up-to-date antivirus program that is upgraded on line at least every third week or more. Most good antivirus programs are under twenty-five bucks and are cheap considering that you could lose all of your data from years of research or lock your computer up.

Also, be informed about viruses and hoaxes! If you aren't sure, look them up! I will post a list of sites that I personally use most of the time that are very good! Again, please do not post virus warnings to the lists! Send them to me and I will determine whether to post them or not. I am posting this to twelve of my lists, that I own and one that I administer, so if you receive this more than once, I apologize. Just delete the extras. Here are the sites that I use:

https://www.virusbulletin.com/virusbulletin/2016/06/throwback-thursday-hypponen-data-fellow/ (Updated 9/28/2020)
http://www.mcafee.com
https://www.broadcom.com/support/security-center (Updated 9/28/2020)
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo
https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity?inid=nortoncom_nav_internetsecurity_homepage:home (Updated 9/28/2020)
https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/forHome.html (Updated 9/28/2020)
http://www.virusbtn.com
https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/sp (Updated 9/28/2020)
https://www.virusbulletin.com/newsletter/ (Updated 9/28/2020)
http://getvirushelp.com/ (Updated 9/28/2020)

Last but not least, be sure to back up all of your material that you can't afford to lose! Good luck and be careful please!