I have noticed an unusual amount of emails being received with no body text, just a .pdf file attached. I don’t open any attachment unless I am expecting it, so the email goes immediately to the trash. After doing some research, I found that apparently attaching a .pdf file is the spammers new method of choice.
Seems like a pretty benign method of spreading spam.
I have been receiving some strange emails lately. The latest one goes like so
Do not reply to this message
Dear Customer,
Our robot has fixed an abnormal activity from your IP address on sending e-mails.
Probably it is connected with the last epidemic of a worm which does not have patches at the moment.
We recommend you to install a firewall module and it will stop e-mail sending. Otherwise your account will be blocked until you do not eliminate
malfunction.Customer support center robot
A zipped file is attached. I didn’t unzip the file but this has all the characteristics of an email virus. As always, never open a file attachment from someone you don’t know.
So, I have been managing my own server for over three years now. I was leasing from ServerBeach for two of those three years. Two years in Internet years is quite a lot of time. Not only did I lease my own personal server from ServerBeach but I also leased two more servers from them for business purposes. I was paying over $600 a month which from my point of view is a lot of money, and makes me a fairly important customer.
I expected at some point in time during those two years that I would receive an email or phone call from an account manager checking to see if I was receiving the best service that ServerBeach could provide. How were my servers performing? Do I need to upgrade? Did I hear about the latest technology being offered by ServerBeach? Instead, I never heard anything from anybody.
Tech support was fairly responsive to my questions. Except when I added a second hard drive for back-ups and they removed my primary drive and replaced it with a newly formatted drive. Sending my primary drive out for disposal. Luckily, after several agonizing hours of trying to reach a company representative I was able to get the mix up resolved.
Last month I decided to take my business elsewhere. I made the move from ServerBeach to a new company and canceled my account without an email or phone call asking why I was closing my account.
I thought maybe after spending over $15,000 in rental fees, someone would want to know why a potential lifetime customer would just walk away.
Phishing scam uses PayPal secure servers
A cross-site scripting flaw in the PayPal Web site allows a new phishing attack to masquerade as a genuine PayPal log-in page with a valid security certificate, according to security researchers.
Be careful of this. Always go to the Paypal website through a direct link and not through a link in an email. No matter who it is from.
There’s a guy who is a long time listener of KZION, and I have noticed that every comment this individual makes on a song has some negative connotation to it. He posts comments fairly frequently and most comments are rude and condescending. I also have observed that this person almost never rates a song over a 2 or 3 (out of 5, with 5 being excellent). Is is just in some people’s nature to be negative? It must be difficult to lead a life where you see faults in everything you look at.
Microsoft released today Windows Live OneCare, an antivirus and spyware application that runs in the background and monitors the users system. OneCare costs $50 a year as an annual subscription fee.
“At the end of the day, all you want your PC to do is work when you want it to,” said Gina Narkunas, lead project manager for OneCare.
Uhm, that’s kinda what I was expecting when I paid $200 for the OS.
73% of respondents to a Compete survey said it is important that financial services providers keep them informed of important issues. 80% of respondents would like to be notified when their credit report is accessed, and 70% said they would like to be informed whenever their credit card is used.
So what is the problem? Why aren’t financial institutions doing this?
I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this blog but if so, what would you consider to be the best way to use IE hacks in your stylesheets? IE allows the use of conditional statements like
This allows you to load an IE specific stylesheet. You can learn more here
Or incremental overrides, like so
Or using hacks like this or any other type
The most frustrating thing about coding websites using stylesheets is trying to get the same look in the different browsers.
Max is leaving the Bloggernacle for many of the very reasons I have ceased with my LDS related posts. I began blogging in June of 2003 and often spoke about LDS issues but eventually became uncomfortable doing so. I won't even comment on other LDS blogs in reference to LDS related issues. I've never written about or discussed this decision and this is about as far as I'll take it.
Have you ever looked at all of the charges added to your phone bill? The actual charges for my home phone line is $26.50 per month.
That's fine. I don't mind paying $26.50 for a phone line BUT that's not all. I also HAVE to pay
Total $13.36
Grand total monthly phone bill - $39.86
Thirty-five percent of my phone bill goes to taxes, fees, and surcharges. I can't think of anything else I buy where there is an additional 35% in taxes and fees added to the cost, except maybe gasoline.
I have been pushing Shelly to let me cancel our Qwest line and just use our cell phones as our home phone but she's not budging.
After observing the term failure in Google brings up the biography of President Bush, I wrote to Google to get their response. Here is their reply:
Hi John,
Thank you for your note. The order and contents of Google search results are completely automated. No one hand picks a particular result for a given search query, nor does Google ever insert jokes or send messages by changing the order of results. Occasionally, when a particular website is the subject of public attention, other sites begin linking to it. This may elevate its importance as gauged by our ranking software, which assigns a PageRank value based in part on who links to a given page.
Higher ranking in Google results may lead to more awareness, which may lead to more links and so on. One side effect of not using an editorial viewpoint to determine the ranking of results is that anomalies occasionally occur. We view such occasions as opportunities for us to learn more about how the web works and how to improve our algorithms for all searches in the future.
Regards,
The Google Team
So, am I to understand that relevant content can be superseded by Google Bombing?
How is that a search for the word failure on Google brings up the Biography of President George W. Bush as the number 1 result?
Politics aside, the word failure does not even exist on the page. Google is playing games with search results and it's wrong!
I have been trying to reach two different people in the last few weeks and I am getting no response. I can only assume my email is getting stuck in their spam filters or they are ignoring me. Hopefully they're not ignoring me 
It's virtually impossible to not use some sort of spam filtering in conjunction with email. If you don't, you will be deluged with all sorts of filth and propaganda. However, if you use spam filtering will you please check your spam folder on a regular basis to see if my email is stuck in there?!?!
I use Mozilla Thunderbird and I have all spam forwarded to a spam folder. I check the folder several times per day. I don't read or open the emails but I do look at the subject line and the senders name and email address. On a rare occasion I find a legitimate email.
Don't turn your filter on and forget about it, please.
Byran Korth and Greg Anderson, I have been trying to reach you!
What do you think would happen if I just kept my PC on, waiting for it to boot up? Yeah, you're probably right. I would die of old age before this hard drive would ever boot again. But I'm going to let it think about it for a few more days while I research prices on hard drives. 
My life is so turned upside down without my PC. I'm using the KZION PC right now but it was bare bones except for radio station related programs and tools. I've had to add email, browser, ftp, and a few other things but I don't want to install anything that will interfere with the station.
What a pain...
I knew it was coming but I hoped it would happen later then sooner. My hard drive is fried. I can only get to the Windows 2000 Professional screen and then it freezes. I have been able to get critical data from a borked hard drive in the past so hopefully I can extract the stuff I need. I just don't have time to start over with a new hard drive nor do I have the money to buy a new hard drive. Arghh...
Welcome to johnhesch.com, a blog about my life, projects, and interests. I have been blogging for over 10 years in one form or another.