Devdude's Weblog

EMail Spam

devdude — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:30:00 +0000

Occasionally I dissect spam emails that find their ways through the spamfilter. Very oftenis some kind of paypal or ebay info saying that the account expired or they suspect some problem information with the account and ask you to login and verify. The login link is always in the email. It always looks ok on the first sight but if you look at the spelling of sender, words and so on you can see the spam.

Todays dissection (original is german): Paypal Security

Wichtige Sicherheits-Hinweise Ihr Konto Zugriff hat nur begrenztem Umfang (Transl: Important security note, limited account access)

Sender: sicherheit_@_paypall_de (see, the double ll at the end) paypall.de is registred by (check here)

Text: PayPal arbeitet ständig an der Gewährleistung der Sicherheit durch regelmäßige Screening/Kontrollen der Konten in unserem System. Wir haben vor kurzem Ihr Konto überprüft, und wir brauchen mehr Informationen, die uns helfen sollen Sie mit sicheren Service anbieten. Bis wir diese Informationen sammeln, Ihren Zugang zu sensiblen Konto-Funktionen werden begrenzt oder beendet werden. Wir möchten Ihren Zugang Wiederherstellen so schnell wie möglich, und wir entschuldigen uns für die Unannehmlichkeiten.

The german text contains quite a number of errors.

Paypall.de points to merchntaccount.com which is a misspelled version (missing ‘a’) of merchantaccount.com (a creditcard/online commerce service provider). merchntaccount.com is registred by (check here), same person or organziation.

The fake login page is not accessible (anymore ?) at this bogus address (some characters removed to stop anyone from stumbling upon it)

http: / / smokylake. com/www. paypal .de/de/_xxxxxxxxxxx_ = _login-submit/webscr.php

Why does spam work ? Because someone sends out this email to 100.000 recipients. If only 1 falls into the trap it worth his effort to fake everything.

Mac and Windows Video War

devdude — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:54:56 +0000

have some time to spare ? which is more funny and creative ?
Microsoft Ad

Apples Short Ads

Spam per Skype ?

devdude — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:57:16 +0000

I occasionally get skype-invitations or contact-attempts from totally strange people in all kind of languages, but Skype never before opened by itself with a chat from someone NOT on my contact list.

Randy Pausch passed away

devdude — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 09:02:01 +0000

Some days late, I read Professor Randy Pausch passed away on July 25th. Even I was never able to meet him or to join his classes, he was a inspiring person. His famous last lecture “Really achieving your childhood dreams” at CMU (link) in September 2007 you can see here (link). I wont comment or try to summarize because it would never be close to his very own word. Please read more about him and also his work on Alice (link).

Slow file opening in Photoshop CS3 under Vista

devdude — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 02:40:32 +0000

You wonder why Photoshop CD3 takes forever to open a file of any size ? Make sure your default printer is local ! Seems very unrelated but works ! See link.

Virtual PC’s

devdude — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 02:17:55 +0000

The concept is not new, and various products exist since a number of years. Emulate an OS within a window for clean environment testing, saving on additional hardware, fooling around, installing software with tampering your system. I remember VM Ware earlier, it appeared a bit scientific to me to set it up. Now we have Microsoft Virtual PC, VM Ware and Virtual Box from SUN (sure some others as well). Just installed Solaris 11 in my Virtual PC, awesome ! Virtual Box supports a wide range of OS. I wish I still would have the OS2/Warp and Win 3.11 disks ! (Link to virtualbox.org)

Another way of loosing data

devdude — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:15:22 +0000

You dont want to stick postit notes on a CD to label the content ! Lucky this backup was redundant !

Free CD/DVD Burn

devdude — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:47:33 +0000

Are you tired of Nero Express with its annoying popups and hiding in the tray ? The VISTA build-in burning not enough features (what features?) ? Check out CDBurnerXP (link) ! Enough features for the 95% of burning you do every other day !

Free Picture Viewer/Browser

devdude — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:59:47 +0000

Looking for a way outside the standard explorer build-in viewer and dont want to pay for ACDSEE or Adobe Lightroom ? Check out xnview (link) !

Apple’s polite Bluescreen

devdude — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 03:19:41 +0000

I use a 12″ powerbook for 4 years now, during that time it served me well and I replaced only a faulty harddisk and a battery. It hardly will crash in the Windows way. A blue screen staring at you right in the middle of doing something, but MAC OS also has a nice message in 4 languages that it needs to restarted due to an error. It dont bombard you with a memory dump that no one can read anyway.