Twitter Series – 7 Steps to Get Started on Twitter

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Using the Internet to Make a Point – Protest against Telecom’s XT

The internet has been hailed as a wonderful tool for everyone to be able to express themselves, whether that be for good or for bad.

There are plenty of bloggers out there who can write, just as there are plenty who can’t, but technologies ability to enable everyone with an internet connection to have their say has flooded the internet with voice and opinion.

Twitter and other social networks were lauded for enabling protesters to distribute footage and news of the Iranian elections and protests. Historically, these images would have been less likely to make it into the public eye.

While not as serious as protesters being killed during political demonstrations, the XT network has failings of it’s own.

Paul Reynolds hair has been widely acknowledged as the real winner amid the storm of publicity around the repeated failures of the XT network.

Who would have thought Trademe would have been the hub of one of the most intriguing protests of recent times.

Check out this auction of a Lemon (Sold as the XT Network)

Through the questions and answers section at the bottom of the auction, New Zealanders have been able to vent some frustrations at Telecom and their flagship mobile product.

Congratulations must go to the seller, for his efforts in replying to every question (well over 500) to encourage further conversation and comment about the networks failings.

If you have time, read them all (It will take a while), as it is a really funny read.

The auction closes later on today, but for a week (and who knows what will happen once the auction closes), XT was vilified, parodied and generally made fun of by ordinary New Zealanders having their chance to make their point.

Posted in Funny, NZ Industry News, Soapbox | No Comments »

The Phishers / Virus Makers have Hooked Amazon now

Phishing is all about getting people hooked, line a sinker, this time Amazon is the recipient of the Phishers focus.

It seems to be the usual DHL / UPS style scam, where a zip archive is attached to an email that carries the nasty payload.

Asking you to print the attached postal label to get your package.

As usual, delete these emails as they are nothing but a cover for a dangerous virus or scam.

Here is the transcript of the email

Goodafternoon!

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com
We have successfully received your payment.

Your order has been shipped to your billing address.

You have ordered ” Asus Eee PC T91Go ”

You can find your tracking number in attached to the e-mail  document.

Print the postal label to get your package.

We hope you enjoy your order!
Amazon.com
Attachment is called Postal_label_Nr234.zip

It is interesting to see these people targeting suppliers / vendors that have wide audiences. Removing any refernce to DHL or UPS as this is starting to get a little old.

I wonder how long it will take for the Anti virus brigade to recognise this new variant.

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Avast Antivirus – Wow!

I have used a number of Antivirus programs over the years. I was a big fan of Mcafee back in the DOS days, moved onto Nortons when it came with my PC (Threw it away when it got too bloated). Tried a number of others and then settled on AVG.

AVG was great. It was free, wasn’t bloated like Norton was (I have been assured that the 2009 and 2010 versions are much better) and seemed to do everything, except custom scheduled scans, you needed to pay for that.

Over the last few years it has worked great for me and I have been through a number of versions, till the recent v8.

However, I noticed it too was getting a bit bloated, using memory and system resources that seemed a bit big while idle.

I thought I would try Avast.

It too is a free anti virus program, for non commercial use and has all of the current drop of shields including Instant Messaging, Web,Mail, Network and more.

Resource wise it was better, not to much between them, but it definitely used less memory than AVG. This was ideal for my laptop that only has 256mb of RAM.

After some toing and froing between versions, the newest version of Avast has been released, so installed this on the resource challenged laptop.

Well some of the initial tests have been quite stunning.

While the proof will be in the protection it provides (The previous versions seem to be good in that regard), the resource usage of this new system is quite staggering.

With AVG installed, the laptop idled once fully loaded at around 260mb (remember this only has 256mb of RAM)

With Avast this reduced to 195mb, around 65mb less. On such a tight resource budget this is huge. Updates and scans obviously take more cpu and RAM, but that is to be expected. Why waste resources when they are not needed.

Well done to Avast, they have made a good product even better, enough to get a WOW out of me!

You can download it here

Posted in Cool Stuff, Reviews, Soapbox, Software | No Comments »

Email Scam targetting mail users at specific domain

Well they keep rolling off the spam/scam production line.

This one pretends to be an email from mail support of a specific domain. As with all of these mass email scams, they don’t realise that the person they sent the email to manages all of the mail for that domain (Including the “support” that is mentioned in the email)

This is a phishing scam hoping to gain logins and passwords to try to gain access to mail (or if you are sharing login details) or other online services.

Here is a transcript

Subject: Your profile will be locked in response to a complaint received by the Administration
from: support-62@deepweb.co.nz

***This message was created automatically by mail-delivery software. Do not reply to this message.*** 

Hello!
Your profile will be locked in response to a complaint received by the Administration 29.01.2010 ?.
According to "paragraph 8 of the user agreement, deepweb.co.nz reserves the right to suspend or terminate the provision of services deepweb.co.nz, promptly notifying the user. 

Refute the statement may be, following this link:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://schwaber.net/472e3bb6">http://schwaber.net/472e3bb6</a>

If the application is not rejected within 7 days, your e-mail an account will be blocked.
It has a number 237242679231777. 

In the near future we will contact you.
It takes up to 3 days to process your request.
Thank you!
--------------------------------
Sincerely,
mail support service
deepweb.co.nz 

As you can see they are using shortened style urls to hide things, but it is unsophisticated as they use a completely unrelated domain as the link.

Most likely this will be handled by the antispam handlers, but shows these scams are still out there and are unlikely to go away.

Other variants of this try to dupe gmail users into giving their logins to the phishers

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