WyzGuys Tech Talk

Its been a while since John Gehl & Suzanne Douglas published NewsScan on the web.  I really miss their site.  It used to be possible to go to the site and look at the archives, but it appears that they may be gone for good (or bad).

 

I was fortunate to have had my comments included in their on-line publication on several occasions, and was once asked to be a guest columnist.  In the interest of preserving these musings, I ...

Phishing – the sending of unsoliticited or SPAM e-mail with the goal of extracting personal financial information from the recipeient, is a serious problem, and represents the great threat for the unauthorized installation of malware.  According to a survey publsihed in PC World, phishers may be geting as much as a 14% return on their efforts.  That means 14 out of 100 spam recipients respond to these fraudulent e-mails and end up giving up their banking user ID’s ...

For those of you who like to purchase software on line for download, there is a trend by software distributors to send their products in an ISO image package, rather than the more familiar .EXE or .MSI installable format.

 

An ISO image must be burned to a CD or DVD and executed from the optical drive.  There is a good article at PC Magazine’s web site that explaines the process somewhat.  i have included it below.

 

I found this article from the Security Watch newsletter from PC Magazine to be interesting, and thought I would share it.  The top ten reported internet crimes are lisited below.  The source is the Internet Crime and Complain Center (IC3), for the year 2006.   As I tell people in my Computer Security class, its about the money these days.  The list follows.

 

Category	% of complaints
Auction Fraud	44.9%
Non-Delivery	19%
Check ...

Frequently, I am on the phone with a computer manufacturer’s technical support line.  This can be a short trip into Hades at its best, but occassioanlly, you just need to speak to a real live human being, even if they are in India.

 

I get the daily newsletter Good Morning Silicon Valley, and in yesterday’s issue there was a short blurb about this site:  Dial A Human, at www.dialahuman.com.  Give it a quick look, they have instructions for breaking through ...

Watch out for this scam.  Note the e-mail return address.   My preferred security product, Zone Alarm Security Suite, killed the attached virus.  the virus was identified as:  Attachment: Update248.exe.  Problem: virus infected W32/Gibe-F.

 

See my photo gallery for a screen shot of the email.

 

 

Thomas Jefferson, believe it or not, wrote one of the most compelling arguments in support of the principles of the Open Source movement over two hundred years ago.  He wrote:

 

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces ...