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Who's in the corner?
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November 21, 2004 |
Random thought:
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Another smelly phish and how Firefox
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Here's an e-mail from Sun Trust telling me about the danger of identity theft and encouraging me to visit the site. Two clues tell me that this isn't a valid message: It's been sent to my Technology Corner address (I've given that one to no banks) and I don't have a SunTrust account. An additional clue is that the IP address shown when I hover the mouse over the URL they're suggesting isn't the same as what's shown on the page. And the entire message is a graphic instead of text. This is not something a bank would be likely to do. |
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So I looked inside the e-mail message with a text editor and found an IP address where a domain name should be. The IP address is owned by a registrar in Europe. |
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Next I pasted the IP address link into Internet Explorer (with the SP2 patch ant pop-up blocking turned on. I got a blank page. |
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But when I turned pop-up blocking off, I got this page. The underlying page was still blank because of SP2 enhancements. A user who hasn't yet installed SP2 would have seen the real SunTrust site in the background window and the phishing site in the pop-up. |
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When I pasted the IP address link into the FireFox command line, it immediately suggested that the page I'd requested should be saved to disk and examined first. In fact, I had no choice. |
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The IP address resolves to a company in Italy. I suspect that the company's server has been hijacked because the phisher is using a non-standard port address and a subdirectory name that the system administrator in Italy probably doesn't even know is on this server. |
Your safety and security are in your hands. Software can't protect you from everything, so it's important to be suspicious of every message you receive. This week I received a message from someone who claimed to be setting up a "birthday calendar". The name on the spam was a common name. One thing that gave this ruse away was that the primary address didn't exist.
I've been talking with the product manager for a company that offers several products that are aimed at providing better security on the Internet. Listen for an interview in December.
Nobody's running around yelling "Hi-yo Silver, away!" but these are exciting days for Mac owners. If you've been around computers long enough, you'll remember DOS utilities that were distributed for free. If you go back even further, you'll know that system administrators of "big iron" systems often shared utilities they'd written with each other. That's happening now in the Mac community. I think it's because the Mac finally has a real operating system.
You may have heard me comment in passing a time or two that I'm no fan of the Mac's earlier operating systems. Or even the later ones. Until Unix-based OS X arrived, Apple had little to boast about. That didn't keep the company from boasting, but now there is something exciting.
What's funny is that Mac evangelists have to stop worrying and learn to embrace the command line. Compared to the Unix command line, the DOS command line is child's play. I am genuinely impressed, by the way, with Apple's success in layering an attractive graphical interface on top of Unix.
I am less impressed by desktop computers that are so loud when they're running that Mac users who live near airports frequently receive noise complaints from airline pilots. And I'm not particularly impressed that the G4 Powerbook gets so hot that I can't use it on my lap without using volume M of the Encyclopaedia Britannica between the bottom of the computer and the tops of my legs. But those are hardware issues and this is supposed to be a story about software.
As a person who has owned a Mac only since OS X has been on the market, I'm enjoying the ability to find free utility applications. I've always been a big fan of utility programs, small applications that the author designed to do one thing. Usually utilities are written in response to a specific need.
For example, Apple's Iphoto program seems to occasionally just "forget" about all of the images you've loaded onto the computer. Apparently this doesn't happen often, but it does happen. It happened to my younger daughter, who had 2000+ photos vanish. They were still on the disk (we could see them in the folders) but Iphoto couldn't display them.
I'd like to be able to tell you that there was a complete discussion of the problem and a solution on Apple's website. I really would like to be able to tell you that, but I'd be lying. A Google search led me to a website where I read about a person who had a similar problem. He wrote a utility that extracts all of the images from the many layers of folders that Iphoto creates. You then have to import them again. Ugly. Time consuming. Annoying. Those are three terms I can use on the radio. But the images are back thanks to some clever work by a person who then posted his repair utility for anyone else to use.
That's why I admire the people who write utilities. It's also why I'm a little skeptical about Apple's commitment to its loyal customers.
I've run across several other utilities, most of which are free or "donationware" and I recommend donating either to the utility writer or the writer's cause if you find that the applications you've downloaded help you. Here are three that I think are well worth downloading.
Click any of the small images below to see a larger view.
This is a re-naming utility that allows users to rename multiple files. If you go to the state fair and come back with 120 digital images, you can sit down with Finder and manually rename all the files starting with "OhioStateFair2004_001.jpg" but wouldn't it be nice to do it automatically? That's what R-Name does, and it's free.
Or maybe you want to change all file names from having upper-case extensions to lower-case extensions. Or vice versa. Add an extension or remove one. Add characters at the beginning of a file name or at the end. And maybe you want to apply the action to a group of files, an entire directory, or a directory and all directories beneath it. Call on R-Name, which also lets you make a donation to UNICEF in addition to finding and replacing text in file names.
UNICEF? Yes, in lieu of payment, the author asks that users make a donation to UNICEF. There's even a UNICEF link on the menu.
Find R-Name here.
Cron is a Unix/Linux application that watches the clock and runs specific jobs you've told it to run at the times you want them to run. It's designed for repetitive tasks. Some servers run specific jobs every minute -- looking for new files in a directory and then doing something with them, for example.
The Unix syntax is hard to read until you've worked with it for a while, so Cronnix adds a visual front-end with 3 levels of complexity called "Simple", "Interval", and "Expert". The final option is the one that's closest to raw Unix, so new users will want to stick with one of the other two.
Because Cronnix is just a front-end for cron, it doesn't have to continue to run after you've added a "crontab". The cron process takes care of actually running the job; Cronnix just schedules it and makes the appropriate entry in a file you can find by visiting /var/cron/tabs/ and using an editor or utility to display the file (more, less, or cat, for example).
Find Cronnix here.
System Preferences provides access to a lot of information about your Mac, but a small utility called InfoMac does a better job. Whether you need a quick profile, information about the attached USB or Firewire devices, resolution of any attached screens, the size of any installed or attached disk drives, or even a list of users, InfoMac can provide it.
Find InforMac here.
The company you pay to provide a fast Internet connection claims 1Mbps or 2Mbps or 4Mbps, but you think it's slower. Are they telling the truth?
The first thing to understand is that the speed promise applies only to data transfer within the ISP's network. In other words, you can expect 2Mbps (if that's what you're paying for) between the ISP and your computer. But once you venture out onto the Internet, you may experience slower speeds.
If you'd like to test your connection, here are some links that will accommodate you.
The US House has passed legislation that bans Internet access taxes through 2007. The Senate modified a measure it had previously passed and sent it to the House. The ban expired a year ago and there were predictions that state taxes could choke Internet growth.
Congress has prevented states and local governments from establishing taxes on Internet access in the future, but the new law allows any existing taxes to remain. Last year, the House voted to make the moratorium permanent, phase out existing state taxes, and expand the ban to include high-speed broadband service.
The malware is disguised as a theme manager for Nokia phones that use Symbian software. The problem isn't widespread, but it is an annoyance. An earlier infection crept onto PCs and then sent spam to mobile phone users in Russia.
If your phone is infected, the Skulls program will have broken links to Symbian system applications and will have replaced their icons with skulls. It's easy enough to fix: Performing a hard reset restores the application, but any data you had on the phone will be deleted.
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Privacy Guarantee:I HATE SPAM and will not sell, rent, loan, auction, trade, or do anything else with your e-mail address. Period.
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