The internet has been hailed as a wonderful tool for everyone to be able to express themselves, whether that be for good or for bad.

There are plenty of bloggers out there who can write, just as there are plenty who can’t, but technologies ability to enable everyone with an internet connection to have their say has flooded the internet with voice and opinion.

Twitter and other social networks were lauded for enabling protesters to distribute footage and news of the Iranian elections and protests. Historically, these images would have been less likely to make it into the public eye.

While not as serious as protesters being killed during political demonstrations, the XT network has failings of it’s own.

Paul Reynolds hair has been widely acknowledged as the real winner amid the storm of publicity around the repeated failures of the XT network.

Who would have thought Trademe would have been the hub of one of the most intriguing protests of recent times.

Check out this auction of a Lemon (Sold as the XT Network)

Through the questions and answers section at the bottom of the auction, New Zealanders have been able to vent some frustrations at Telecom and their flagship mobile product.

Congratulations must go to the seller, for his efforts in replying to every question (well over 500) to encourage further conversation and comment about the networks failings.

If you have time, read them all (It will take a while), as it is a really funny read.

The auction closes later on today, but for a week (and who knows what will happen once the auction closes), XT was vilified, parodied and generally made fun of by ordinary New Zealanders having their chance to make their point.

Phishing is all about getting people hooked, line a sinker, this time Amazon is the recipient of the Phishers focus.

It seems to be the usual DHL / UPS style scam, where a zip archive is attached to an email that carries the nasty payload.

Asking you to print the attached postal label to get your package.

As usual, delete these emails as they are nothing but a cover for a dangerous virus or scam.

Here is the transcript of the email

Goodafternoon!

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com
We have successfully received your payment.

Your order has been shipped to your billing address.

You have ordered ” Asus Eee PC T91Go ”

You can find your tracking number in attached to the e-mail  document.

Print the postal label to get your package.

We hope you enjoy your order!
Amazon.com
Attachment is called Postal_label_Nr234.zip

It is interesting to see these people targeting suppliers / vendors that have wide audiences. Removing any refernce to DHL or UPS as this is starting to get a little old.

I wonder how long it will take for the Anti virus brigade to recognise this new variant.

I have used a number of Antivirus programs over the years. I was a big fan of Mcafee back in the DOS days, moved onto Nortons when it came with my PC (Threw it away when it got too bloated). Tried a number of others and then settled on AVG.

AVG was great. It was free, wasn’t bloated like Norton was (I have been assured that the 2009 and 2010 versions are much better) and seemed to do everything, except custom scheduled scans, you needed to pay for that.

Over the last few years it has worked great for me and I have been through a number of versions, till the recent v8.

However, I noticed it too was getting a bit bloated, using memory and system resources that seemed a bit big while idle.

I thought I would try Avast.

It too is a free anti virus program, for non commercial use and has all of the current drop of shields including Instant Messaging, Web,Mail, Network and more.

Resource wise it was better, not to much between them, but it definitely used less memory than AVG. This was ideal for my laptop that only has 256mb of RAM.

After some toing and froing between versions, the newest version of Avast has been released, so installed this on the resource challenged laptop.

Well some of the initial tests have been quite stunning.

While the proof will be in the protection it provides (The previous versions seem to be good in that regard), the resource usage of this new system is quite staggering.

With AVG installed, the laptop idled once fully loaded at around 260mb (remember this only has 256mb of RAM)

With Avast this reduced to 195mb, around 65mb less. On such a tight resource budget this is huge. Updates and scans obviously take more cpu and RAM, but that is to be expected. Why waste resources when they are not needed.

Well done to Avast, they have made a good product even better, enough to get a WOW out of me!

You can download it here

Well they keep rolling off the spam/scam production line.

This one pretends to be an email from mail support of a specific domain. As with all of these mass email scams, they don’t realise that the person they sent the email to manages all of the mail for that domain (Including the “support” that is mentioned in the email)

This is a phishing scam hoping to gain logins and passwords to try to gain access to mail (or if you are sharing login details) or other online services.

Here is a transcript

Subject: Your profile will be locked in response to a complaint received by the Administration
from: support-62@deepweb.co.nz

***This message was created automatically by mail-delivery software. Do not reply to this message.*** 

Hello!
Your profile will be locked in response to a complaint received by the Administration 29.01.2010 ?.
According to "paragraph 8 of the user agreement, deepweb.co.nz reserves the right to suspend or terminate the provision of services deepweb.co.nz, promptly notifying the user. 

Refute the statement may be, following this link:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://schwaber.net/472e3bb6">http://schwaber.net/472e3bb6</a>

If the application is not rejected within 7 days, your e-mail an account will be blocked.
It has a number 237242679231777. 

In the near future we will contact you.
It takes up to 3 days to process your request.
Thank you!
--------------------------------
Sincerely,
mail support service
deepweb.co.nz 

As you can see they are using shortened style urls to hide things, but it is unsophisticated as they use a completely unrelated domain as the link.

Most likely this will be handled by the antispam handlers, but shows these scams are still out there and are unlikely to go away.

Other variants of this try to dupe gmail users into giving their logins to the phishers

Many times there are things that show the US Centricness (Is that a word?) of the internet:

• .com readily meaning US site
• US date formats in online forms
• USD as the default currency

Well another example is the idea that every country must use UPS and DHL for their parcels.

Why else would all of the post / courier etc virus emails sent all around the world have these two as the only options to use.

The phishers seem to have a better idea…use a local provider to have a better chance of success. (Even these guys get it wrong: Note to Spammers – I dont have any Commonwealth Bank of Australia accounts)

What is wrong with NZPost? I suspect that in any case like this, an email from a local bank / services company / postal service etc would be more troublesome to the local population.

So, look out for suspicious emails from local suppliers, and as should be usual practice, here are a few standard tips to protect you from email nasties:

• Any email asking for any form of login / password should be treated suspiciously
• Any email warning of a security breach should be treated suspiciously
• Don’t click on any links in emails that you are unsure of, instead go to the website manually
• Don’t open any attachment that is unexpected, this especially includes zip files
• Keep your virus software up to date and make sure email scanning is turned on!

Let me know of any other tips or other virus laden emails you have had to send to your trash bin.

I have received a Twitter email saying that:

Due to concern that your account may have been compromised in a phishing attack that took place off-Twitter, your password was reset. Please create a new password by opening this link in your browser:

Now, funnily enough, I don’t remember any phishing attempts coming my way, and by the number of similar issues that others are having, who also don’t remember any phishing attempts, it seems more likely a glitch at Twitter.

Phishing attacks are usually to capture logins and passwords so the attacker can gain access for some illicit purpose, but there were no bad tweets, no changing of settings, no damage I could see at all.

Again, none of the others I have read about have found any damage either.

I use some third party software and plugins to manage my Twitter account, so it could be one of those, but that isn’t phishing, that is a security breach.

No one seems to have any ideas, the closest I found was a reference to software such as Seesmic or Tweetdeck users having problems.

Some people were getting these emails ten times or more.

Here is a blog post about someone else’s experience (worse than mine, so far

Have you received one of these, have you had any issues resetting your Twitter password?

Let us know in the comments…

Internet Explorer 6 is an old browser, in internet terms it is a dinosaur. Released in 2001, it has been the mainstay of peoples internet experience over the last 9 years.

The masses are often reluctant to change unless something pushes them along.

Firstly, Firefox gave users a good alternative browser to use (Better in my opinion)

Then came regular security issues, each time a further section of the browsing public moving to another browser. Most recently was the security hole that caused a breach in Google and over 30 other companies.

The key thing to note about this last issue was the speed and loudness of some governments urging people to look at other browsers to prevent further problems.

Some say that Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as the first choice in some countries.

However, there are still about 20% of the internet population using Internet Explorer 6.

I have now just read of Googles impending chang in in policy to cease support of IE6 from the 1st of March. This specifically deals with Google Docs and Sites, but shows a willingness to help push the remianing 20% into more modern browsers.

I support this as it has the following benefits:

1. Wider support for the new HTML5 (IE6 would not be able to offer this new technology)
2. Improved browser compatibilty with web standards
3. Speed

It would be great if those 20% could not use Google at all, that would really send a message!

If you want to know more you can visit IE6 No More, a site dedicated to helping it disappear as soon as possible

If you use IE6, why don’t you upgrade?

Well as usual, the run up to Christmas was frenetic with lots of things to get done before the break. It has been quiet for the last few days as many clients in this part of the world are either on holiday, or are in the Tourism industry and are working hard during the peak of the season.

So I thought I would list up the latest clients into the Deepweb stable, welcome to all…

• Kerikeri Bed and Breakfast Group – Group of 7 local bed and breakfasts
• Kansai Fishing – sail assisted fishing vessel
• Whangarei Heads Tourism – Accommodation and Activity providers
• Reubens Cruises – Ferry service and other cruises
• Auckland Escape – Out to Kawau Island and other water tours
• Bounty Inn – Paihia accommodation
• Elvis the Voice – Elvis entertainer
• Far North iSite – Visitor Information for the Far North
• Bed of Roses – Kerikeri Accommodation
• One on One Swimming – Swimming Coach in Wellington
• RCToys – Remote Controlled Toys
• Breakaway Retreat – Accommodation on the Whangarei Heads

Some of the more common recent spam comments posted on this blog and others are obvious spam, but have the added benefit of including jokes.

Some are actually ok. Here are a few recent ones…

• Why did the dinosaur cross the road? Because there were no chickens in those times.
• What do you get when you play a country music song backward? You get your wife back, you get your job back, you stop drinking …
• Why do hurricanes travel so fast? If they traveled slowly, we would have to call them slow-i-canes

So OK, they are not great, but make spam less annoying