Various Y2K experts predict that some of the nation's water supplies will fail when the clock strikes midnight because of computer problems, but the water utility industry strongly disagrees.

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At another utility, in an undisclosed city, Slammer downed the computer network controlling vital equipment.

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What would've been a much better idea is to build a web configuration utility and give people the choice to configure it from their computer.

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"You'll see squishy balls flying around the office, " he says, adding that he is a pretty eccentric entrepreneur, often working out of a sport-utility vehicle retrofitted with a three-foot-long desk, two computer screens, a fax machine and shredder.

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Symantec's Hacker Protection utility, like Shields Up, scans your PC for open ports--electronic gateways into a computer--that hackers can exploit to access a system and files.

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