May 2007

Scam/Virus Alert – emails from IRS with Subject “Complaint Case Number…”

by Michael Sheehan on May 30, 2007

in General, Microsoft, Security

Scam, Virus, Phishing alert!

Looks like there is a variant of the Better Business Bureau scam is circulating now but seemingly from the Internal Revenue Service, and I was a recipient of one of the emails. It came in with a title of: “Complaint Case Number ###### against User Name” from, supposedly “fraud.dep@irs.gov”. The body itself looked somewhat legit and there was a Rich Text Format (RTF) document attached called “COMPLAINT.rft”.

Update: 05.30.07@6:03pm PST: Security sites are finally picking this up.

It’s my job to be paranoid so I saved the file and ran a virus scan against it. Surprisingly it came up clean (from a Norton Anti-Virus scan). I didn’t believe that so I decided to do a Google search for “complaint.rtf irs” and it produced no results (which means that nobody has posted or I didn’t have enough terms to search). So I took a different approach and searched for “You have received a complaint in regards to your business services .The complaint was filled” which was the first line in the email. That produced a lot of results. After reading the first result, I knew that I was on to a variant. One clue that I had was the formatting of the date: mm/dd/yyyy/ (note the trailing slash). Why is it that these phishers and scammers always do something that is “not quite correct?” Is it a consciously made decision to drop a hint? Also, from reading the linked article above, the attachment contains a trojan downloader that will install a keylogger which supposedly posts back to an IP. Anyway…

So, for everyone’s benefit, I have posted what I received in hopes that people will spread this warning and the other Security sites will pick this up. DIGG this post to be sure to spread the word!

See text below as well as the screen shot I took; note that I replaced my name and company with generic terms but left everything else as I received it: [click to continue…]

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reCaptcha – post comments and help digitize old text

by Michael Sheehan on May 26, 2007

in General, Open Source, Software

I’m sure that a lot of people have heard about Captcha…if you have downloaded files from RapidShare or tried to post comments on a blog (like mine) or register for a new site service or something like that, you have probably come across Captcha.

Captcha stands for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is design to prevent automated systems or bots from impersonating a human to post spam or automatically register on forums with the intent of posting spam there. With Captcha, you are essentially presented with a series of letters and number or words that may appear wavy or skewed in some way. You are then requested to “translate” what you see and type it into a field. Only if you do this correctly, can you proceed with your action. You can read all about Captcha on this Wikipedia article.

Enter reCaptcha…where if you do the action, you are actually help to digitize old text. It’s actually a very interesting concept. There are thousands of old text that are currently being digitized. However, even some of the most sophisticated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) recognizes the old text incorrectly. This is where reCaptcha has come up with a really interesting approach to solving this problem.

reCaptcha presents the user with two words, one that is known and already been “translated” from an image to a word and the second, one that has not been translated. If the user gets the first one correct, then the Captcha system assumes the second one has been entered correctly and then stores that result. I believe it continues to present the word with other “known” words until a sample of users has identified the word accurately a significant amount of time. It’s pretty ingenious. You can read more details about this technology and initiate here.

Or you can test it out and identify some old text by posting a comment below (or now on any of my blog entries). reCaptcha has plugins for WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, Movable Type, and Typo3 as well as the major web development environments: PHP, Ruby and Perl.

[click to continue…]

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Pheedo to Feedburner Synergy, at last!

by Michael Sheehan on May 25, 2007

in General, Software

I’m not sure what happened but after a few phone calls with the Director of Publisher Relations at Pheedo (thanks Jeff), deleting and recreating feeds and possible DNS issues at my hosting provider, it seems that my feeds are now working again, and feeding each other. To refresh on the concept, unfortunately I was unable to “qualify” yet for Feedburner feed ads (who knows, maybe later I will as my traffic grows) so I discovered Pheedo as a possible other ad provider. See my previous post about the issues.

Anyway, this time around, the steps worked properly (we did exactly the same thing, so maybe it was recent DNS issues at Dreamhost). This is what you have to do:

  1. Get a FeedBurner account (be sure that you download and install their plugin for WordPress)
  2. Get a Pheedo account
  3. In Pheedo, set up a “Purple” account set up the first feed (pulling from your blog). For me, the feed source for my blog is: http://www.hightechdad.com/feed/ .
    Then set the name for your Pheedo feed. Mine is: http://www.pheedo.com/f/techdadblog/.
  4. Now go to your FeedBurner account and set up a new feed using the source as your Pheedo feed. My new FeedBurner feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/hightechdad
  5. That “should” be it.

So, now I have ads being served by Pheedo but my feed is being tracked, enhanced and published Feedburner.

[click to continue…]

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Working with Pheedo, Feedburner and WordPress

by Michael Sheehan on May 23, 2007

in General, Open Source

I have been playing around with Feedburner, Pheedo and my blog’s feeds and somewhere in the process, something got confused (or maybe I did, who knows). My old feed started showing rows and rows of the “email this * save to del.icio.us * add to del.icio.us…” etc. (See the image below)

Feedburner Issues

My intention was to see how I could get Feedburner and Pheedo to peacefully co-exist (feeds coming to you, the end reader, from Feedburner but feed ads coming from Pheedo). Yes, that is right, ads on my feeds. I read that most people read blogs through feed readers (and not the actual site) so, adding ads to my feeds seemed to make more sense (or cents). [Help me, click on some ads!]

Don’t know if anyone has successfully done this (I have read on Pheedo that it can be done and am following the steps outlined to me and then clarified by me with support). Here are the steps:

  1. Sign up for Purple on Pheedo
  2. On Pheedo, put in my original feed URL (in this case http://www.hightechdad.com/feed/)
  3. On Feedburner, change my feed source from http://www.hightechdad.com/feed/ to http://www.pheedo.com/f/techdadblog/

[click to continue…]

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Bluetooth Internet Sharing from Windows Mobile 6 to Mac OS 10.4.9

May 17, 2007

In the past, there were ways to share your cell phone’s internet connection via Bluetooth on a Mac using the DUN profile on Windows Mobile 5 (sorry for the geek-speak). With the recent introduction of Windows Mobile 6, Microsoft removed that profile, thus alienating many Mac users who used to enjoy the Bluetooth tethering/internet sharing [...]

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WordPress updates code to 2.2…and I follow

May 16, 2007

First post under WordPress 2.2. Did some rookie moves when I did the upgrade (thought I remember what I needed to do) and forgot to push the wp-includes directory. Here are highlights of what changed (aside from the 200+ bug fixes/feature upgrades). Widgets – you can get rid of your Sidebar Widgets plug-in by Automattic, [...]

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What Web 2.0 would have looked like 10 years ago

May 10, 2007

Microsoft has been including IE7 in all of the latest Critical Updates. It’s getting harder and harder to avoid installing. At my work, we recently had to roll back some of our users’ machines to remove IE7 so that an automated testing software could run properly on IE6. So that got me thinking (and searching) [...]

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How to Fix Master Browser (MRxSmb) Event ID 8003 errors

May 9, 2007

I was reviewing some Windows Small Business Server 2003 Event Logs and came across a repeated entry in the System log. It basically looked like this: Event Type: Error Event Source: MRxSmb Event Category: None Event ID: 8003 Date: 5/8/2007 Time: 10:05:16 PM User: N/A Computer: [SERVER] Description: The master browser has received a server [...]

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