RE: House approves spyware legislation

["Simon" <simon () xhz ca>]

> As a tech support guy you could have talked them through using the
> command-line ftp client.

Good idea, with someone that take about 90 second to type his own email 
address I may end that call within the next hour! ;)

And for the others, the call will probably take at least 15 minutes and we 
are supposed to keep calls below 8 minutes, or else the phone queue starts 
rising, clients are waiting and getting irritated by our bad tech-service...

Besides, the ISP I work for does not support anything that happens outside 
of the "service" we provide.  If the internet actually reaches the computer, 
we're done, it's not our business if the computer has some trouble that 
prevents it from accessing the internet.  Though we do deal with the obvious 
and easy to fix.  Such as misconfigured firewalls, paranoid anti-viruses, 
etc...

But the procedure you mention, I could do them, but the other agents, my co-
workers, do not know about this and if a client calls back saying that they 
need to do it again, but with another agent, we screwed things right there.  
Everybody in the call center would need proper training to do this 
procedure, which should be, but unfortunately, I don't work for the right 
ISP, they don't care much about the clients.

But I'll have a word about this with my supervisor, and I'll try to move 
things a bit more.  Actually, the best thing to do would be to mirror the 
anti-adwarez we suggest to our clients (I personnally suggest ad-aware) so 
that they don't need to get the browser, just the anti-adwarez and use their 
IE again right after.  That would simplify things and help clients and us as 
well very much.

So, I'm forwarding your post to my job email and thanks a lot for the 
suggestion!

Simon


> 1: you ping ftp.mozilla.org and note the IP address (in case their 
> DNS is hosed)
> 2: tell them how to open a "DOS" box
> 3: from that DOS box ftp to ftp.mozilla.org
> 4: navigate them to the Firefox 1.0PR release and tell them how to 
> download it
> 5: install aforementioned browser
> 6: use that to get McAfee's Stinger, anti-spyware tools etc (if DNS 
> is broken, that may require your help to determine appropriate IP addresses
> instead of host names)
>
> 7: tell them that if they keep using the browser they've just downloaded
> their spyware problems will be minimised :-)
> ....
>
> and so on.
>
> I've actually done this procedure for someone whose IE refused to
> co-operate.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Phil
> ----
> Phil Randal
> Network Engineer
> Herefordshire Council
> Hereford, UK
>
> _______________________________________________
> Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
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--
Simon Lemieux (Simon () Xhz ca)

_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
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