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Wow, you need to be really careful about phishing scams. I have got genuine Emails from Paypal that say, Resolution Center: Your account is limited.

And they have been genuine. I have gone into Paypal manually by NOT clicking on a link in the Email and had to update things. (And also after getting into Paypal I check the address again and also the title bar, plus the security certificate as it is a secure connection using a link of the form https://www.paypal.com I believe the reason my account is limited is because I make Paypal payments sometimes from here in Kuwait sometimes while directly connected to the Internet and sometimes via Anonymizer proxy which makes it look like I am located in the United States. (If you didn’t know, a web site can see the IP address that your computer has and then lookup who owns that address to see where you are) So Paypal figures that how can someone make payments from different places so closely together.

I just got an Email the same thing but it didn’t look quite right. So I looked at the message and there were some typos and also the link in the Email (can I say again, never click links in Emails!)

So how did this Phishing Email get to me with such timing? Though it looks like the site is not working. The idea in these scams is to get you to go to a site that looks like Paypal so they can get your password etc. as you login thinking it is Paypal!

So, be paranoid!

The link in the bogus Email is in hexadecimal to a website in India which doesn’t work now. The site by looking up the IP address in with a whois query on the site address gives:

person: Vijay Menezes
nic-hdl: VM14-AP
e-mail: vijaym@hathway.net
address: Trade World, B Wing, 10th Floor, Kamla Mills Compound,
address: Lower Parel,
address: Mumbai 400013
phone: +91 022 56623333
fax-no: +91 022 24933355
country: IN
changed: vijaym@hathway.net 20040419
mnt-by: MAINT-IN-HATHWAY
source: APNIC

I guess the ^$!*%# fellow who is doing this scam got caught? The link buried in the source of the scam Email is: which translates into: in decimal format. And fortunately the site doesn’t work anymore, you get:

Network Error (tcp_error)

A communication error occurred: “Operation timed out”
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.

For assistance, contact your network support team.

Plus, the latest version of Firefox sees this as a reported web forgery giving this message.

I haven’t tried it with MS Internet Explorer 7 yet to see what happens as there is a new anti-phishing feature in MS Internet Explorer 7. MS Internet Explorer 6 will just try to go to the page and in this case will not find it as it is not, fortunately, online anymore.

(more…)

From Worth1000. Click image for larger version.

This from articles last week online and in The Daily Star in Kuwait.

Bill Gates keeps close eye on kids’ computer time
OTTAWA (Reuters) – Just because you’re the daughter of Bill Gates does not mean you get to play on your computer all day long.

The Microsoft founder said his 10-year-old daughter, his oldest child, was not a hard-core Internet and computer user until this year, when she started at a school where the students use tablet computers for almost everything.

“She became very avid and discovered a lot of computer games, including one that runs on the
Xbox 360 called Viva Pinata, where you take care of your garden,” he told a business audience in Ottawa.

“She could spend two or three hours a day on this Viva Pinata, because it’s kind of engaging and fun.”

Gates said he and his wife Melinda decided to set a limit of 45 minutes a day of total screen time for games and an hour a day on weekends, plus what time she needs for homework.

Microsoft’s new Vista software enables parents to control the Web sites their kids go to but also includes an audit log that records sites they have visited and whom they’ve been Instant Messaging.

“Up to some age, to be determined, it’s very appropriate for a parent to get a sense of what they’re seeing out there and be able to have conversations about it,” he said.

“My son said, ‘Am I going to have limits like this my whole life?’, and I said, ‘No, when you move away you can set your own screen limits’,” Gates recounted, to audience laughter.

Experts: No cure in sight for unpredictable hard drive loss

Read it all, or the moral of the story is, back up your data and you really should also do mirror backups of your operating system drive so if your drive fails it doesn’t take too much time to restore, relicense software etc.! Expect that if you keep your computer long enough the drive will fail.

See more in misterian’s computer tips.

My wife had a laugh at a block of Ipsum Lorem and this is what they say about it.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. From: Lorem Ipsum – All the facts – Lipsum generator

Wikipedia further says:

The text is derived from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (About the Extremes of Goods and Evils, or alternatively [About] The Purposes of Good and Evil ). The original passage began: Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit (Translation: “Neither is there anyone who loves grief itself since it is grief and thus wants to obtain it”).

Click here.