Trick or Treat

Have A Safe And Happy Holiday

Gmail — Automated Phishing Detection

Google’s Gmail is currently testing a service designed to alert Gmail users to messages that appear to be phishing attacks.

These phishing alerts operate automatically, much like spam filtering. Gmail’s spam filters automatically divert messages that are suspected of being unwanted messages into ‘Spam’. Similarly, Gmail’s phishing alerts automatically display warnings with messages we suspect are phishing attacks so you know to exercise caution before providing any personal information. (for more details, click here)

Important: You should always be wary of any message that asks for your personal information, or messages that refer you to a webpage asking for personal information.

(You might want to think about how Gmail could do this ‘detecting’…)

If you aren’t quite sure what to look for when you suspect an e-mail might be one of these cybercrime ploys, this brief video can help.

To Detect Phishing

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Windows 7 64-bit Adventures

In keeping with the times, I decided to Go 64 (bit) with my new Windows 7 install (aka “upgrade”). 64-bit computing is officially here for us Average Folk, and it has many advantages. One of the nicest is the ability to “access” more RAM memory.
(I wrote previously about 64-bit and Windows 7. See, A Tech’s First Impression of Windows 7 64-bit)

64-bit operating systems can have lots of RAM, and since the machine I installed Windows 7 on only had a mere 3 Gigabytes of RAM.. and since my motherboard could accept up to 8… and.. Windows 7 64-bit can “see” 8.. well.. I decided to go and buy 8 GB’s of RAM modules and stick them in. (I am a capital “G” geek, after all..)

First, I visited the SystemScanner memory upgrade advisor tool at Crucial.com (a memory chip manufacturer) and downloaded it, and ran it. It told me exactly what type of RAM to buy.

In my case, the “best” my machine can accept turned out to be PC2 6400 (800 MHz DDR2), non-ECC, non-buffered. It isn’t important that you know what those things are, but it is important that the chips (aka “modules”) match the specifications. Also, good to know is, DDR2 is “dual channel”, so you want to install your modules in pairs. (The newer DDR3 is “tri-channel”, and should be installed in multiples of three.)

So that is what I asked for at the store.

It turned out that the best deal at that particular store, on that particular day, of 2 GB DIMMs of PC2 6400, was Crucial “Ballistix” memory.. a more “high end” type of performance memory favored by gamers. Installation went smoothly, and Windows 7 handled the hardware change with alacrity and ease.

(And.. I picked up an Intel® Core™2 Quad processor, which I will tell you about tomorrow.)

So for a relatively minor investment, I brought my older HP Pavilion a1763c into the new era of 64-bit high performance computing with Windows 7. I like the improvement. Yes I do!
But I have to confess, so far, I have not been able to come even close to having enough going on that that much RAM is being utilized… maybe I need to encode some videos, or something, to see all 8 being used. But I think I would have been fine with 6 GB’s…

A note if you are considering this yourself: DDR2 memory prices are actually on the way up now, and DDR3 prices are dropping, so if your machine uses DDR2, you may not want to put off an upgrade too much longer.

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Windows 7 Onboard

Yesterday my Windows 7 upgrade disc finally arrived from Amazon. (I’m not complaining. I had opted for the slow shipping method because I’m “frugal”.) 20 minutes later, I was running Windows 7 Home Premium on my HP Pavilion dual-core desktop.

I wrote in my earlier articles on the Win 7 betas that the install process was the fastest and easiest Windows installs I had ever experienced, so I was not surprised that the “official release” retained this wonderful ability.

Once I had my Desktop, the first thing I did was visited Windows Update, even though Win7 goes out and looks for updates during the install process. There were 7 regular updates and 7 “optional” updates available for me.
These updates are important, and the sooner you get them onboard the better, so I recommend that everyone click Start > Windows Update as one of your first moves.

Doing so had the side-effect of launching IE 8 for the first time, and so it wanted to be “configured”. I almost clicked on the “quick configure” (as I had on the beta versions) but at the last moment I noticed that the “Default search provider” has been changed to Bing.
No thanks.

Next up was to get an antivirus onboard. Since I installed a 64-bit version, and since Windows 7 is so new, I though maybe my number of choices might not be too many.. but I clicked on the “Action Center” flag and saw I had two “notices”, one of which was “no antivirus detected”. So I clicked that, and then I clicked on “Help me find a solution“.
Pretty simple.

A page opened which showed the various vendors who had products compatible for my system. I was glad to see that pretty much all (all?) the reputable vendors were listed. As I plan to test several anti-Spywares in the near future, I simply installed Microsoft Security Essentials for now.
64-bit Windows 7 is inherently already quite secure. (And you may want it for that reason alone.)

So far (and I haven’t been running long.. mere hours) I haven’t seen any difference between this “official version” and the RC 64-bit. Which I have already described in prior articles. You can be assured will write more in the future.

Related links: to see my reviews of Windows 7, and other Win7-related writings, click here.

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Eight Common Cybercriminal Tactics

Folks, a quick reading recommendation today. This article by Joan Goodchild describes and explains how the cyber-criminals try to trick us into clicking on links and/or revealing our personal information. Forewarned is forearmed, so learn to spot these ruses now…

Social Engineering: Eight Common Tactics

 

“Famous hacker Kevin Mitnick helped popularize the term ’social engineering’ in the ’90s, but the simple idea itself (tricking someone into doing something or divulging sensitive information) has been around for ages. And experts say hackers today continue to steal password, install malware or grab profits by employing a mix of old and new tactics.

Here’s a refresher course on some of the most prevalent social engineering tricks used by phone, email and Web.” Click here to read.

See how many you recognize.

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Deciphering Texting (aka "Lingo")*

Folks– obligations require a re-posting today.

I have an embarrassing confession to make–I don’t always know how to translate what someone has text-ed into English. I need a Text-to-English dictionary. This is just one more fact, added to an already long list of facts, that tells me I’ve gotten old. We didn’t have ‘texting’ when I was a teenager.

At first, I thought texting (aka “lingo”) was simply X-treme Abbreviation. And then, I thought it might be a combination of vanity license-plate Language and X-Abbreviation. This thinking allowed me to read some of what I saw, but not all. I could decipher “gr8″ and “l8r”, but not “ttyl”. It didn’t help that I wasn’t a “text-er” myself (Use a cell phone and give myself ear cancer? Not this fella!).

And then it dawned on me– these kids are using an Adult-proof secret code. They don’t want me to decipher it. The world suddenly made a lot more sense. When I was a lad, my friends and I had used code too.

Fortunately, there are resources available for those of us who are lingo-challenged. If you see “A/S/L”, but don’t understand what it means, you can find out (age/sex/location?) — and if you are a parent concerned about your child and what they’re doing and saying on the Internet and in chatrooms — I suggest you do.

If you’re like me, and just want to learn, and try to increase your “hipness” quotient (or just avoid some terrible faux pas), you will also find these translation resources useful and interesting. My favorite of these online dictionaries is Lingo2Word. With it, you can paste in text, and have it automatically deciphered for you.

Related link: Lingo2Word. “Lingo2word is devoted to demystifying the new Internet shorthand language of Text messages, Chat rooms and Emails. We are devoted to the fun of text messaging in all forms, there is a whole new fun language out there just waiting for you!”

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Britons Wake Up. Too Late.

Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public

“Successive U.K. governments have gradually constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world.. The development of electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information have become pervasive, routine and almost taken for granted.”

This NY Times article is an important read. It seems that people in England are discovering that giving one’s government too much power might not be such a good thing.

“It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives.”

All I can say is.. isn’t it a little late to think of that?

This article features one woman’s experience in a striking example of abuse of power, and it is a glimpse at our future.. unless we get smart now, and stop buying into the “it’s for your protection” (aka “combats terrorism”) lie. Surveillance is NOT necessarily a good thing, people.

Please read, Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public

Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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