TheGarage Tech Blog

Microsoft Launches Security for Windows

I NEVER COULD QUITE UDERSTAND the mentality of people who fall for the fake emails requesting private information, aka phishing. Well, here is some insight to why that technique is so successful.

I came across this story at F-Secure. If you run Windows or get on the internet at all, you should check out F-Secure. Currently, at the top of their blog page they have a poll for what anti-virus is being used most. You will probably be surprised by the results.

I tell you what, something is phishy in Denmark.

I don’t understand the mentality of enforcing dope pushing laws in one place but not in another. Same with fraud and deception laws. My private email box, which I own and pay the costs to run, is like the worst corner in the the worst neighborhood you can imagine–minus the violence. The point being, they are pushing dope and running scams in both places.

At the least, spamming my email box with offers of ten different kinds of dope from ten different outfits is malicious mishchief. But to me, it amounts to pushing dope. And then you have the eBay and CitiBank security verification requests or the fucking Nigerian who needs my help getting some money in country.

It’s not me I am so worried about, I can take care of myself. It’s the children. I am worried for the children. I demand the police, local state and federal, put a stop to it all. I want my streets, and my email box, cleaned up. And I want them cleaned up now.

Anywhere else and the narcotics teams and vice squads would be all over it. RICO and all that. Serious charges and serious jail time.

On the internet, the perps operate with impunity. Why? Because the respective police powers can’t stop them, that’s why. That’s how much we rely on police power to make people act right.

It is for the same reason that some neighborhoods in the real world are runnng rampant with crime and others aren’t. If the people refuse to obey the laws and the police aren;t willing to go in with violent police force, the laws are ignored. Laws are only for the suckers who obey laws.

[Editor's note: To limit the hateful comments and the hate mail, the victim's name has been elided from this post.]

I was Googling to see if there has been any new information on [a certain] murder case I wrote about involving the young pregnant woman who was shot in the head while riding a motorcycle last Sunday. So I start with the simplest search using the victim’s name. On that search, my friend Trench over at News of Doom is #1.

After clicking through several pages of results, I notice first that only a couple of the entries on the first page had anything to do with story. But then I notice that my site is not included in the fist five pages. That is not a good sign for my PageRank. So I do a little more checking. I do a search for ‘[Victim's name] shot’, no quotes.

Pretty much the same results. Trench is at the top, then ABC news, then the random combinations of the victims first name and last name begin. Hmm. I’ll try the “[victim's name] shot”, using the quotes to limit results to only the victim. Only five listings and my site is not among them. Now I’m pissed.

I click on the Google message at the bottom saying some similar sites were left out but by clicking you can see the omitted results. There I am at number three. I was culled by Google. Rastards.

And, by the way, there has been no recent coverage of the investigation into this tragic case, if there even is an investigation.

You heard it here a two years ago and several times since. It has been slow in coming but check out this article about a rock band making it big without backing from a big record company.

What makes Arctic Monkeys remarkable is that they are an indie band on an independent label, and that they achieved their sudden success almost entirely through grassroots promotion on the web.

The foursome got together in 2002. They started playing shows around Sheffield and passing out free CDs at gigs. They encouraged their fans to trade the tunes online and to post them to websites and P2P networks. Yes, they encouraged file trading. Eventually, more and more people found them on MySpace or on their website via word-of-mouth, and their reach started to widen. Fans started booking them in venues farther and farther away from their hometown. Wherever they played, everyone in the crowd knew the words to the songs. This is all before they even signed to a record label.

Curiously, after achieving phenomenal success on their own, they contracted with a record company. A better deal, I think, would have been cut with Wal-Mart. Heh, a distribution deal with Wal-Mart is better than a deal with one of the powerful RIAA members. The kicker is that all it cost Wal-Mart to provide the service is some disk space and a few minutes of a webmaster’s time. Maybe $150 bucks.

I wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Wal-Mart open low-cost, state-of-the-art recording facilities Located in regions like Austin, Memphis, L.A., New York–wherever this is a robust music scene–for use by artists with whom they have distribution deals.

The main reason the RIAA are so vicious in protecting their copyrights is because they know that in the very near future that music is all they will have the rights to sell. They are not worried about the future because they rightly figure they are not in it. The musicians will finally wake up and small the java realizing that the web is the only place they need to be. Then they will realize that they don’t need a big record company with expensive production equipment and media contacts to do it. They just need a good web strategy and a good web development team.

My previous articles on the demise of the big recording companies and RIAA :

One Artist, One label
• Recording industry boo boo
• SCO suffers setbacks, retreats
• EZ-Jackster

I am sitting here on Sunday morning sipping a cup of joe, surfing through the channels, and on Bravo I find a television show called Outrageous and Contageous Viral Videos that has a narrator running the audience through clips that you can find at any number of sites on the internet. Here are a few of the viral video clips featured:

• Cheney’s Got a Gun
• John Ashcroft singing
• Buzz Aldrich punching a guy
• Brittney’s baby riding in the lap gaffe
• Cartoon of Bill O’Riley talking dirty on the phone
• Howard Dean’s infamous Yeearrgh!!!
• A big fat guy got a running start and hurled himself into snack machine, vertical belly-flop style, smashing the front glass to smithereens.
• The Trunk Monkey vehicle security system, for when just getting your car back isn’t enough
• And finally, The Mercury Mistress

Bet you’ve seen some of ‘em. As a matter of fact, I bet that half of everyone with broadband has seen at least one of the clips featured. But I bet very few people with dial-up connections has seen any of them at all. Curiously, I don’t recall any high-speed internet commercials during the show.

They teased the video clip of the week over at Bravo.com. Gotta spread the traffic around. Pretty smart application of media convergence. Soon the blurring lines between the wired net and the broadcast net will not exist at all.

Outrageous and Contageous Viral Videos would have been way better than surfing for the clips if it weren’t for all the same stupid commercials that viewers are constantly bombarded with on television. But the show was still pretty good relative to everything else on the dial because I didn’t have to look at a lot of bad clips to find the few really good ones. It doesn’t take a lot of time to download just a few clips, but it does take a lot of time to download a dozen or two, most of which are not worth the effort.

The people programming the television channels don’t “get it” and therefore bombard their customer’s with repetitive, asinine commercial interruptions. Maybe the majority of people aren’t bothered by the interruptions but I will rarely endure them, preferring to watch my entertainment uninterrupted.

The networks are in desperate need of a better way to present advertisement. Until they figure that out, the network’s will continue to bleed customers and television bandwidth will be all about delivering the best of the internet to their remaining customers who do not yet have access to high-speed internet.

It has been several weeks now since getting any major referral spam. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve deleted a single blatant Texas-hold-em referral in two weeks. It’s weird actually. Not that I am complaining.

Not to worry, I just trashed about half a dozen. I had no illusions that the spammers were gone for good. But, still, I like to see the spam patterns change every now and then so I’ll have some bit of comfort knowing that someone is dishing it back to the spammers. Nothing like a full dose of the FBI to fuckin ruin your day.

I hope somebody’s on it. The same technology used to pump out spam can be used to clog the entire Internet, literally bringing the WWW down.

If spam can be stopped then it should be. If spam can not be stopped, there may be a security problem.

The Russians seem to be on to something with their anti-spam measures.

• Our government at work: The Can Spam Act
• Progress in fighting spam
• Cookies, anyone?
• We are at war with the spammers
• Sentence handed down in spam case
• Whose Cookies Are In My Cookie Jar?
• UPDATED: PSA- Beware unscrupulous cyber-marketers

Some crazy kid had an idea for an internet ad gimmick called Million dollar website. It paid off.

Here is the million dollar site. Here is a site of a wannabe who is trying the same gimmick.

Who knows, maybe lightening can strike twice. But I doubt it.

Ever since I rolled an old company 401K plan over into a Fidelity IRA a couple of months ago, my inbox has been loaded down with investment spam. I am pretty pissed about it too.

I know, I know. Spam is a fact of life. Everybody should be used to it by now. Well here is what really burns my ass. I used my personal email address that I host at my domain, doncallaway.org, when I performed the rollover transaction. You know which account I am talking baout. It’s the special email address that you rarely give out. The one you give to your friends and such. The one you never use for purposes like free newsletters, myspace, jmeeting, job bulletin boards, chat, and all the other online crap that requires an email account.

For all the online crap, I use a throw-away email account. When a throw away account is to the point that I have to delete 100 messages for every one I read, I consider that account burned and I throw it away and replace it with another throw-away account. The nice thing about gmail is that I can forward the throwaways to my personal account. When the throwaway is burned, I just create another one and forward it to my real account.

Several years ago when I owned Overnight Recovery, a financial services company, I went through a dozen variations of Overnight##@hotmail.com, where ## was 20, 40, 60, 80, etc. Then the spammers got clever and for every base word, like ‘overnight’, for example, they would just stick on infinite suffix and prefixes. Maybe one out of a thousand variations would hit a valid email. What did the spammers care, they weren’t uing their computers to do the work.

Anyway, with the spam filters that hotmail and the other outfits have implemented over the years the problem is not near as bad as it used to be. The majority of spam ends up filtered out and then deleted, never to be seen by human eyes. Now you can go years with just a few throwaway email accounts. But still, an account can get burned if it winds up on the wrong spammer’s list.

This is where I think don at doncallaway dot org is at with the fucking investment scam spammers. Thanks a lot Fidelity. Obviously I expected more from such a supposedly prestigious organization. If I had known Fidelity was in league with the spammers, I would have given them a throw down email address. Or more likely, I would have chosen a different investment company with whom to do business.

Oh, and Fidelity, don’t try to deny you sold my email address and don’t say I agreed to it. The coincidence is too great and I am suspicious of even tiny ones. Furthermore, I have never, ever knowingly agreed to having my email address shared so other affiliated companies can send me ‘valuable’ information. So if I did agree it was because you scammed me.

Other stories on this site related to spam:

• Sentence handed down in spam case
• Our government at work: The Can Spam Act
• Progress in fighting spam
• Cookies, anyone?
• We are at war with the spammers
• Whose Cookies Are In My Cookie Jar?
• UPDATED: PSA- Beware unscrupulous cyber-marketers

From the Web 2.0 article written by Tim O’Reilly that I mentioned in an earlier post, the author makes the following point:

A further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data. In many of the early web applications, copyright is only loosely enforced. For example, Amazon lays claim to any reviews submitted to the site, but in the absence of enforcement, people may repost the same review elsewhere. However, as companies begin to realize that control over data may be their chief source of competitive advantage, we may see heightened attempts at control.

On the other hand, as “participants”, aka, consumers, begin to realize the value of having control over content they create in the form of comments and reviews, we may see heightened attempts by the consumer to recieve reciprocal remuneration for supplying valuable content.

Maybe thinking such as that will not be widespread until Web 3.0, but I’m already there.