Fraudsters Now Create Legitimacy Through Websites
Weekend morning are times for tinkering and on the first of October I found a good candidate for tinkering in my e-mail in box. It was a message from "Barr. Mohn Ghazali Bin Mohd.(Esq)" (The punctuation and spacing are his.) Except for one thing it was a typical, unremarkable "I want to share $9.7 million with you" message. The differentiating factor wasn't the address the message came from (I'm sure that most "barristers" in Malaysia use MSN accounts). It wasn't the salutation ("Hello Dear"). It wasn't the Random capitalization or the poor use of English. It was the presence of a website address.
I read the message (as you can, if you wish.) The main thrust was that a business magnate (the fraudster even spelled that right!) who lived in Malaysia for 13 years died in the 2004 tsunami and, naturally, left no heirs. Barr. Mohn Ghazali Bin Mohd.(Esq) had searched for an heir but couldn't find one. But then he found my name (which was mentioned nowhere in the message) and suggested that I "stand as the next of kin." He would keep 60% of the money and I would get 40%.
He then invited me to visit his "webpage".
It's obvious that this message is fraudulent but it was Saturday morning and I wanted to peek under the shroud. Here's what I found. It's both dangerous and foolish to follow an unknown link, particularly when the stench of fraud is already so strong, so I started with Google.
Text that shows up on Google suggests that the firm was established in 1988 but a quick check of domain registrations indicates that the name was registered just last year.
We already have strike 1 (MSN e-mail address).
We already have strike 2 (barristers don't perform mundane operations such as seeking next of kin and more than Supreme Court justices defend drunk drivers in municipal court.)
We already have strike 3 (random capitalization, funny punctuation, and grammar errors that most fifth-graders wouldn't make).
So I guess the lie about the date is strike 4.
The whois search also gave me an IP address so I thought it would be good to see where the site is hosted.
And the answer is Walnut, California.
I have written to the hosting company to suggest that they may want to decommission this site under their standard terms of service.
For good measure, I ran the domain name through Central Ops and learned nothing of interest.
So now it was time to take a look at the site but by a roundabout way.
My assumption was that this is just a run-of-the-mill fraudster but there's no guarantee that somebody who wants to obtain your money through trickery might not also want to plant some malware on your computer.
The problem with visiting a website, even if you think all of your computer's protective mechanisms are strong and up to date, is that the site may have some new trick for planting malware. I prefer to examine the code without opening the page in a browser.
So I started the Windows PowerShell (it's on your computer if you have a computer that runs Vista or a later operating system) and you may have it if your computer runs XP.
This command stores the website's default page in a variable:
$w = (new-object net.webclient).DownloadString("http://www.abdlaw.net")
Once I had the code, I could examine it line by line, copy it, and paste it into Dreamweaver. References to graphics were relative to the document so they didn't work from my location but they showed up when I globally replaced relative references with fully qualified references.
That still didn't tell me much, though, because most of the site is Flash based. To see that I would have to load the site in a browser.
But not on my primary desktop computer.
I have the latest version of Flash so it should be reasonably safe but I wouldn't try this on any computer where it would be inconvenient to reinstall the operating system.
I loaded the page with Firefox on a Windows 8 notebook. If anything went wrong, I would lose the Windows 8 partition and that's all.
Because I have scripting turned off by default, not much of the page appeared.
When I turned scripting on, the page appeared, and with it many more strikes.
Perhaps the ugliest and most misaligned logo I've seen in the past year or so graced the top left corner.
The page told me that this "prestigious" law firm also considered notary public service to be important, which makes about as much sense as equating Nordstrom's and Walmart.
The website continued the e-mail's practice of Randomly capitalizing some Words for no Apparent reason, the text included a line break where none should have been, and on and on.
Overall, there wasn't much new to learn here but it was an amusing way to spend a Saturday morning.
Farewell to Steve Jobs
Not all news is surprising and certainly this isn't. Steve Jobs died Wednesday at the age of 56. Apple's website said the company "has lost a visionary and creative genius." In the early 1990s, many technology reporters (including me) felt that Apple was destined for the dust bin. Apple had been so badly mismanaged that it had just 5% of the computer market. Then Jobs returned to Apple.
Apple's website on Wednesday evening.
NPR's Laura Sydell created a retrospective that ran on Thursday morning. If you missed it, you can listen to the Steve Jobs memorial on NPR's website.
Jobs was reportedly hard to work for. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed working for Apple and I'm not sure that I would have liked Jobs as a person but as a futurist, a technologist, and a marketer he had no equal.
He has been compared to Edison. To Ford. Even to DaVinci. He should probably also be compared to P.T. Barnum. Regardless of your opinion of Steve Jobs, he was clearly a visionary who could imagine products we would buy and enjoy if only they existed. And he made them exist.
Jobs made Apple the largest retailer of music in the US. He financed Pixar Animation Studios and later sold the company to the Walt Disney Company. He said “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?” And that defines his life.
You know the story. Jobs was ousted from Apple in a boardroom coup by John Scully in 1985, created the ill-fated NeXT computer, returned to Apple in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT, and became the "interim" CEO in 1997. In 2004 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which is usually a death sentence. After two medical leaves of absence, he resigned as CEO in August of this year.
Oh ... and there's the world's most famous Apple commercial: 1984 or the alternate reality version.
Lightroom 3.5 Upgrade Kicks Pixels
When Adobe released Lightroom 3, it was a revolutionary improvement for an application that is equally useful to both amateurs and professionals. For professionals, it's a great workflow organizer. For amateurs, it may be all you need. Now the 3.5 upgrade adds support for more cameras and adds lens profiles.
Maybe you're wondering what a lens profile is. Every lens has certain unique characteristics and not all of those characteristics are good. A zoom lens may exhibit pincushion distortion at one end of its range and barrel distortion at the other, for example. Adobe and users of its various products have created profiles that programs such as Lightroom can use. When you tell Lightroom which lens you used (or allow the camera's EXIF data to tell Lightroom for you) the program can apply corrections for you.
You don't have to accept the corrections. If you disagree with what you're seeing on screen you can tweak or even eliminate the modification. And, if you're willing to spend a little time, you can even create a profile that fits your exact lens.
Lightroom 3.5 and Camera Raw 6.5 add support for more than 20 lenses from Canon, Hasselblad, Nikon, Pentax, Sigma, and Sony. And raw-format support is included for a dozen or so new cameras from Fuji, Hasselblad, Olympus, Panasonic, Phase One, and Sony.
The update also fixes some bugs that were introduced in versions between 3.0 and 3.4.
Lightroom 3 was already considerably faster than Lightroom 2, but the 3.5 update makes the new version even faster. When it comes to software, faster is always better because nobody likes to wait on a computer. If you already own Lightroom 3.x, the upgrade comes without charge. Those who own Lightroom 1 or 2 will pay the $100 (OK, $99) upgrade fee.
Why Do Computer Manufacturers Do This?
Big manufacturers (HP, Toshiba, Lenovo, Dell, Sony, and such) usually ship computers that contain a lot of "crapware" (applications the buyer doesn't want or need). Even worse, the computers usually come with a "recovery partition" on the hard drive instead of a CD or DVD that the buyer could use to create a clean installation of the operating system. To say that I deplore this practice would be an understatement.
This kind of nonsense creates confusion. Here's a message from Keith, a Dayton listener: "My son's newer I7 HP desktop is Windows 7. The defragment shows 3 "drives": OS (C:), HP_Recovery (D:), and System. The System doesn't seem to want to defragment. It stays at 14% or 13%. How do I get the System to defragment or is it a moot point?"
My reply: I haven't been able to track down anything regarding "System" and, without a drive letter, it's not really a Windows drive. Is there any chance that Linux or some other operating system is also installed? If you use the disk manager (Control Panel, type "disk man", and select "Create and format hard drive partitions"), does it show any partition called "System"? Is System there and without a letter? It's probably OK to leave alone because it appears not to be a normal Windows drive.
Keith then sent a screen shot of the Disk Manager showing a partition called SYSTEM and without a drive letter.
Apparently the SYSTEM partition on HP computers (100 MB) is used to confirm that the version of Windows on the computer is genuine. Why HP needs 100 MB do do this is a mystery and that's in addition to the 11 GB of space that HP takes for the HP Recovery Partition. But maybe the SYSTEM directory contains recovery tools that are used in conjunction with the Recovery Partition.
I presume that the computer didn't come with a Windows DVD and that's one of the reasons that I will not buy a computer from HP (or most of the other big vendors). The "system recovery" depends on the health of the system's hard drive.
That said, I don't have any idea what HP puts in that partition or why the defragmenter can't do much with it. It would seem that anything in there should be static and, once written, will never be changed. Hence the fragmentation would reasonably be expected to be zero.
But I digress. There's probably no point in trying to defragment that partition or to do anything else with it.
Here are a few references:
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Hardware/system-partition/td-p/247398
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Operating-systems-and/Deleted-system-partition/td-p/251841
http://archive.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=1778440
This kind of lunacy is one of the reasons that I deal with a local assembler of computers, TCR in Pickerington and Lancaster. Buy a computer from a local assembler and you'll also receive local support for your computer and a genuine Microsoft installation CD or DVD without all of the crapware.
Short Circuits
Amazon Monetizes Library Loans
Last week I mentioned that I had downloaded a library book from Digital Downloads, a project that includes more than a dozen libraries in central Ohio and elsewhere in the state. This week I understood how Amazon plans to monetize that capability.
On Thursday I received a message from Amazon.
The book I had downloaded in Kindle format will expire in 3 days, the message said (Read fast! Read fast!) but I could purchase the e-book version with a single click and, if I did that (or if I borrow it again from the library), any notes and highlights that I created will be preserved.
The War That Came Early is an "alternative history" work of fiction. Amazon describes the second book in the series (The Big Switch) this way: "In this extraordinary World War II alternate history, master storyteller Harry Turtledove begins with a big switch: what if Neville Chamberlain, instead of appeasing Hitler, had stood up to him in 1938? Enraged, Hitler reacts by lashing out at the West, promising his soldiers that they will reach Paris by the new year. They don’t. Three years later, his genocidal apparatus not fully in place, Hitler has barely survived a coup, while Jews cling to survival. But England and France wonder whether the war is still worthwhile."
Alternative histories require that we suspend disbelief with a little more gusto than usual for fiction and that means that basic historical detail needs to be more accurate. Absurd things that happen in real life would never be accepted in a work of fiction so it's a bit disturbing to have low-flying Russian bomber pilots wearing oxygen masks and German tank operators making puns that work only in English.
Even so, the War That Came Early series is a strangely compelling series even if it's not one that I would be likely to buy.
Will HP Continue to Sell Personal Computers?
New Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman says she'll decide what to do with HP's personal computer division by the end of the month. The former Ebay CEO and former candidate for governor became head of HP when the former CEO, Léo Apotheker, was fired. The company's stock has been in free-fall and one might presume that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are spinning at about 78RPM in their graves.
HP previously announced that a decision might not be made until the end of the year but Whitman says the delay is discouraging to employees and to customers.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, Whitman has "painted a dire portrait of California's recurring budget deficits, rising public debt and lagging spending on education. Whitman also called for reforming the state's tax rules and lowering the tax burden on business. But she acknowledged that such changes face steep political obstacles."
This describes the stage on which HP must decide whether to continue its PC division and, if it continues that division, whether to keep it in California.
For more than a year HP has been the graveyard of CEOs. In August of last year CEO Mark Hurd resigned and Cathie Lesjak took over as interim CEO. In September, Léo Apotheker became HP's new "permanent" CEO but in September of this year, Apotheker was fired and Whitman became the new "permanent" CEO.
The author's image: It's that photo over at the right. This explains why TechByter Worldwide was never on television, doesn't it?
