The idea of Personal Firewall Day was hatched last year by a group of computer security professionals who want to get the word out to home users that everyone needs protection from viruses, worms, and outside intruders.

Pass the word to someone you know.

If you’re wondering why your e-mail is suddenly filled with messages containing paragraphs of gibberish, Wired magazine has the explanation.

The story quotes Anthony Baxter, one of the developers of SpamBayes, a free, open-source Bayesian antispam filter: “I’d say at least half of the spam that I bother to look at now contains a paragraph or two of random blather. This is yet another escalation of the arms race between spammers and those people who like to have a useful e-mail inbox.”

According to Wired, “The addition of seemingly nonsensical words is aimed at confusing the antispam filters that incorporate Bayesian analysis techniques, such as SpamBayes and SpamAssassin. These filters examine incoming e-mail messages and calculate the probability of it being spam based on each message’s contents.”

Beginning January 7, some Norton AntiVirus users began experiencing odd and annoying delays when they tried to open some types of documents, such as those created in Microsoft Word. Symantec is blaming Verisign. See the official response here. This article also includes a fairly cumbersome workaround.

Apparently, updating the certificate revocation list resolves the problem. If you’re still experiencing these delays, let me know.

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to fixyourownprinter.com. My trusty old LaserJet4 was jamming, and these guys appeared to have the fix. I promised a follow-up. Here it is.

These guys rock! I ordered the kit via the Web. It arrived a few days later. It included a very clear instructional video on CD-ROM and a kit that included all the parts I needed. The video walked me through every step of the repair, which involved partially disassembling the printer and replacing a half-dozen parts. All told, it took about two hours, and the result is a printer that works just like it used to.

Two thumbs way up for these guys. If you’re having problems with a printer, check ’em out.

I’m in the process of migrating to a new design for this site. You may notice some odd visual glitches or links that don’t work; I should have everything fixed up in a day or two!

If you’re expecting a new computer, bookmark my latest Expert Zone column: Set Up a New PC. It includes a short checklist of the items I go through when I set up a new computer with Windows XP.

In the past two weeks, I’ve run across a new form of parasite that’s worming its way onto computers. One particularly obnoxious pest is called CoolWebSearch. I hadn’t even heard of it until I did a little research at one of my favorite anti-spyware sites, SpywareInfo.

A wonderful page called The CoolWebSearch Chronicles describes the many variants of this problem and includes a tool that should get rid of it, if you’ve had the misfortune of being zapped.

My old Laserjet 4 still prints out great-looking pages, but pages were starting to jam. The printer is less than 10 years old, built like a tank, and should last for another decade. I looked in vain for a fix, and was just about ready to write it off when I stumbled across fixyourownprinter.com. This company sells parts packages for all sorts of printers (HP, Lexmark, Apple, Epson). Their Web page described the exact problem I was having, with details about the specific problem that lead me to believe they know what they’re talking about. The package I looked at also includes a video (on CD-ROM) that shows how to install the replacement parts.

I’ve ordered the repair kit. I’ll let you know whether it works.

Does a strange icon labeled only with a tilde (~) keep appearing on your desktop? The mystery is now solved. It’s apparently a harmless but annoying bug, caused by a combination of a Microsoft security patch and an Outlook Express setting. Read details in this article on Computing.Net: Strange ~ icon on desktop solved. Kudos to whoever figured this one out.

Want one more good reason to have a firewall, good antivirus software, and a properly paranoid attitude about security? The New York Times, in an article entitled Hackers Steal From Pirates, to No Good End, confirms what I’ve been saying for a while: The latest round of viruses and worms were specifically designed to hijack computers and dragoon them into an army of spam servers.

“…at least a third of all spam circulating on the Internet is now sent from or relayed by personal home computers that have been taken over, said Jesse Dougherty, director of development at Sophos, an antivirus and antispam company.”