Rick's World

I'm a gadget nut. Ask anyone who knows me. My house is filled with way more gadgets than the average single guy would need. I have three TVs (all Sony, all 'old-fashioned' picture tube models), I have surround sound receivers, I have two DVRs (one a Tivo, one not), I have satellite TV, I have lots of Apple hardware. One thing I do not have, is an HDTV.

It's not that I've been ignoring these things. I've been keeping an eye on them for years. Of course I avoided buying one for the biggest of reasons - price. When they first came out they were $5K-$10K or more. These days, they've dropped into the $1-2K range for most of them, even the big ones. However, I'm still very hesitant to get one. Yes, one of the big reasons is the price. $1-2K is a lot of money to spend on a TV that realistically I don't watch a whole lot. I might watch it for an hour or two a night. Plus, it's not just the cost of the TV. You also need a new Blu-Ray DVD player, a new stereo receiver (for the HDMI signal coming from the Blu-Ray player), a new satellite dish (to receive the HD television signal, a new Tivo (to record the new HD television shows). etc. All those new gizmos add up to several thousand dollars! Not something I want to spend! But there is one other reason, irregardless of the money that makes me hesitant. Quality.

As I said before, I have three Sony SDTVs in my house. The oldest of which is over 15 years old and it still works perfectly. The most recent of these TVs is the 32" Sony I use as my main, living room TV. I think I paid about $400 for this TV about 5 years ago. Of course it still works flawlessly. Compare the perfect 15 year track record of my oldest TV with what appears to be a pathetic track record of these big screen HDTVs.

About 4 years ago, I bought a nice 20" Dell LCD monitor for my computer at home. I used it for about 3 years happily. I loved the thing. Perfect picture, looked nice, worked well. No complaints. About a year ago, I upgraded to a 24" Samsung LCD monitor (which honestly I'm not that happy with). So I put the 20" LCD aside for a month or so. About a month later, I decided I wanted a dual monitor setup at work. I knew the company wouldn't buy me one so I brought in my old 20" Dell to work and connected it. I used the old Dell as my main monitor and my previous monitor as the secondary monitor. However, as soon as I connected the Dell at work, I noticed a distinct difference in how the colors looked on the old Dell versus the newer (cheap) Acer LCD I had at work. My Dell had noticeably worse color. It was still bearable, so I kept using it. Within a year of installing it at work, however, my nice Dell monitor died completely. A large swatch of the screen right down the middle just went bonkers and I couldn't fix it. The monitor was dead. Looking back on this I realize that this monitor had started to go bad a year before it died. When I first moved it to work I noticed the colors it displayed were not quite right. Despite that I used it, bad colors and all for the better part of a year. This means that essentially my monitor had started to go bad only 3 years into owning it! it's possible that those colors could have started going bad even before that, but I didn't notice because I didn't have another monitor next to it to compare it with.

What does the story of my dead LCD monitor have to do with the quality of HDTVs? Everything. Most HDTVs sold these days are LCD - the same technology used on my dead LCD monitor that only lasted 4 years (3 if you count from when I started noticing the colors were bad). Now LCD computer monitors are fairly cheap these days. You can buy them from anywhere from $200-$400. If they only last 4 years, not a big deal. An HDTV, however, runs at least $1000 and that thing is expected (at least for me) to last a good 15-20 years! The problem is, I don't think they will. If an LCD computer monitor only lasts 4 years, what's to lead me to think an LCD TV will last 15? It won't. I just can't bring myself to spend that kind of money on a TV that will die in a couple of years. What am I going to do, spend $1500 on a TV every 5 years or so? That's ridiculous! Now you may argue that LCD technology has improved over the years and these LCD HDTVs should last a lot longer. I don't believe it. I've noticed HDTVs in electronic stores that are clearly defective. The colors are WAY off, and I've even seen images permanently burned into the screens. I was in Sam's Club yesterday. They had a big display of HDTVs showing Wall-E (one of my favorite movies from this year) in HD. So I paused to admire the great HD picture on these TVs for a moment. That's when I noticed that one of the TVs had a image permanently burned into the screen! If a TV that runs 8 hours a day for maybe a year can suffer these issues, then that means that if I were to buy one, and it ran maybe a couple of hours a day in my home, the thing would only last a couple of years.

I just can't bring myself to spend that kind of money on a technology that doesn't look very reliable.

Around election time, there are often many people, such as myself, that consider the candidates running and don't like either of them. This time it's a bigger, more important election than usual - the election of the next President of the United States. Some people support Barack Obama, and some people support John McCain. Me? I don't particularly care for either of them. I will not vote for Barack Obama due to his frequently stated intention to raise taxes. I am not comfortable voting for John McCain either. I just think he is way too old to be president. I've watched him in several debates and he does not look very healthy and clearly is not as alert at Obama. I imagine that being the President is an incredibly stressful job. This kind of stress can do bad things to your health. I don't think John McCain could handle the job physically.

So I don't like either Barak Obama or John McCain. This puts me in a bit of a quandry. If I tell this problem to others, they will likely tell you, "Well, you have to vote for one of the two. Just vote for whom you think is the lesser of the two evils". This implies that there are only two people running for president. As such, I have to vote for one of them.

This is not true.

There are in fact thirteen different people/political parties running for president this year, at least based on the information in the sample ballot that I received. What? You mean you thought there were only two political parties in the United States - the Demo crats and the Republicans? Surprise! Not that I'm particularly suprised that most people think there are only two parties in this country. If the American media is any indication, this is a fact. How many parties were represented in any televised presidental debates? Two. How many parties with candidates running for president are ever mentioned on the nightly news or in the daily newspaper? Two. So that means there must be only two parties right? WRONG. The American media is incredibly biased, and I believe intentionally so, towards these two parties. If the American media were truly impartial, as they claim to be, the presidential debates would be considerably more complicated and a lot more interesting. Can you imagine thirteen different presidential candidates up on stage at the same time? That would certainly make for some interesting debates. Can you imagine all thirteen of these candidates getting equal time in the news? That would certainly lead to some interesting discussion of the issues at hand, rather than the typical mudslinging that the two main parties lob at each other.

In the interests of educating my fellow Americans to the reality of the election, rather than the narrow image portrayed by our media, I thought I'd list all the presidental candidates and provide links to their web sites for your education.

Candidate (President and Vice President)	Political Party	Website
John McCain Sara Palin	Republican	http://www.johnmccain.com
Barack Obama Joe Biden	Democrat	http://www.barackobama.com
Gloria La Riva Eugene Puryear	Party for Socialism and Liberation	http://pslweb.org
Chuck Baldwin Darrel Castle	Constitution Party	http://www.baldwin08.com
Gene Amondson Leroy Pletten	Prohibition Party	http://www.geneamondson.com/prohibition-party-2004.html
Bob Barr Wayne A. Root	Libertarian Party	http://www.bobbarr2008.com
Thomas Robert Stevens Alden Link	Objectivist Party	http://www.objectivistparty.us
James Harris Alyson Kennedy	Socialist Workers Party	http://www.themilitant.com/campaign
Cynthia McKinney Rosa Clemente	Green Party	http://votetruth08.com
Alan Keyes Brian Rohrbough	America's Independent Party	http://www.selfgovernment.us
Ralph Nader Matt Gonzalez	Ecology Party	http://www.votenader.org/index.html
Brian Moore Stewart Alexander	Socialist Party	http://www.votebrianmoore.com/
Charles Jay John Wayne Smith	Boston Tea Party	His web site is largely nonfunctional, so here's a link to his Wikipedia page.

Um... I'm going to have to pause here a minute and collect my bearings. I just spend the last half hour compiling the above list of Presidental candidates, and I have to say that I am disturbed. There are no less then three Socialist parties running (if you don't count the Socialist tendencies of some of the Republican and Democratic policies). And there's even a party called the 'Boston Tea Party'. Um, what? I'm beginning to understand why I've never heard of some of these parties before. These guys are complete nutjobs! One party sounds like a joke, and several parties want to turn this country into a Socialist country (i.e. RUSSIA). While, I'm sure some of these parties are reasonable people with a valid plan for the country, some are just crazy.

Ok, I just did the first real research I've ever done into who I'm going to vote for President and I have to say that I am at a loss for words. It's clear I have a LOT of research to do about these people. Some are clearly nutjobs and can be easily removed from my personal list of candidates, but some are still possible. I'm just stunned by how many incredibly bad people have managed to get themselves onto the ballot. And to make matters worse, the ballot doesn't even list the name of their political parties! All it has is three letter abbreviations for their party name. Until a few moments ago, I had no idea that the "SWP" party on my ballot was the Socialist Workers Party. I guarantee some of these wackos will get votes because people will just vote for whomever because they don't like McCain or Obama. This is truly disturbing.

This blog really went 'off the rails' from where it started. That list of candidates really bothers me. Is this the best we can come up with? Either the same old, same old in the Republican and Democrat parties, or a bunch of nutjobs? I worry about the future of this country.

Time for yet another spam scam email analysis. This time, the scam is an emailed plane ticket. Here's the email I got:

Return-Path: <bykvjypw@brainstem.com>
Received: from 37-8.2-85.cust.bluewin.ch (37-8.2-85.cust.bluewin.ch [85.2.8.37])
	for <rick@ekle.us>; Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:23:39 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from [85.2.8.37] by brainstem.com.inbound10.mxlogic.net; Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:23:39 +0100
From: Southwest Airlines <bykvjypw@brainstem.com>
To: <rick@ekle.us>
Subject: Your Online Flight Ticket  N 45109
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:23:39 +0100
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.71.2730.2
Importance: Normal


Good day,
Thank you for using our new service "Buy flight ticket Online" on our website.
Your account has been created:

Your login: rick@ekle.us
Your password: PASS0PAW

Your credit card has been charged for $986.14.
We would like to remind you that whenever you order tickets on our website you get a discount of 10%!
Attached to this message is the purchase Invoice and the flight ticket.
To use your ticket, simply print it on a color printed, and you are set to take off for the journey!

Kind regards,
Southwest Airlines

Attachment: E-ticket.zip

Let's take a look at the mail headers. Here are a few things to notice:

From: Southwest Airlines <bykvjypw@brainstem.com>

Hmm. So apparently I'm getting an email from Southwest Airlines. If that is true, why is someone from brainstem.com sending it to me? Clearly, 'brainstem.com' is not Southwest Airlines. It's some Microsoft certified company in Maryland. Clearly this email address is fake. I would suspect the spammers did a couple of things here.

1. Picked the name of an American airline company, likely at random. This time they choose Southwest Airlines, but I suspect other emails are sent with other airline names (Delta, American Airlines, JetBlue, etc.)
2. Chose a domain name at random... In this case it was brainstem.com
3. Created an email address at random... In this case it was 'bykvjypw'.

From Addresses are easily forged and should never be trusted. I've had spam emails sent with my email address as the From email, and I certainly did not send it, nor did I approve it. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do to stop this. You just have to accept that people will do this. Of course, if this email was from Southwest Airlines, the email address would have been 'something@southwest.com'. Southwest.com is the domain of Southwest Airlines. This is one sign that it is not valid.

Received: from 37-8.2-85.cust.bluewin.ch (37-8.2-85.cust.bluewin.ch [85.2.8.37])

This header tells us the domain name and IP address of who sent the email. By looking at the name and IP we discover that this was sent by 'bluewin.ch', which appears to be an ISP of some kind in Switzerland! So, I'm getting emails from Southwest Airlines by way of Switzerland? I don't think so. Looks like another zombie computer.

Your credit card has been charged for $986.14.

Scare tactics. They expect you to react to this as "Oh my God, someone charted nine hundred bucks on my credit card! I'd better check this out." You then open that evil file attachment and you are infected. This is a scam. Your credit card was not charged. They don't have your credit card.

print it on a color printed

Um, what the heck is a 'printed'? I assume they meant 'printer' here. This is yet another example of the bad grammar and/or typos that frequently appear in these scam emails.

File Attachment: E-ticket.zip

Look. It's another zip file attachment. This is a huge warning sign. Let's take a (careful) look at the contents of this zip file... Unzipping this zip file, I find a single file 'e-ticket.doc.exe' inside. This is yet another example of the double file extension trick. Due to the way Windows works, it will normally hide that '.exe' part of the filename. This makes the filename look like 'e-ticket.doc'. This makes you think it is that airline ticket they said it was. Of course it's not. It's actually a program that will infect your computer if you run it.

Conclusion

A good attempt. They got the grammar mostly right. I only found one blatant typo. This would likely trick most people. For a brief moment I thought it was real. Of course, once I studied it some more I realized it wasn't. It also helps to use a little common sense here. Did I recently spend $900 on a plane ticket? No. Clearly this is not valid. Could it be identify theft? Yes, but even if it was, you can log onto your credit card company's web site and validate if this $900 charge was made. And even if it WAS made, you just dispute the charges with the credit card company and you are not out a penny. None of your money is at risk.

Always remember that a little common sense and a healthy dose of skepticism will often save you from falling for these scams.

The scare tactics in this email attack your pocketbook. It appears to be an email from my credit card company indicating that someone used my credit card fraudulently. Here's the body of the email:

Received: from [67.158.232.43] (unknown [67.158.232.43])
	for <rick@ekle.us>; Tue,  7 Oct 2008 14:54:16 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from [67.158.232.43] by mxmta.bellnet.ca; Tue, 7 Oct 2008 13:54:16 -0800
From: "Kelsey Fuller" <telesonicstetherese@qc.aira.com>
To: <rick@ekle.us>
Subject: Fraud Transactions
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2869
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2869

Greating
Dear Valued Customer,

We have reasons to believe that your credit card 
has been involved in a number of fraudulent transactions 
we have spotted recently. Enclosed is the account 
statement with the list of transactions made with your 
credit card between 01.09.2008 and 03.09.2008. Please look 
carefully through the enclosed document; the last three of 
the listed transactions are the ones that we suspect to be 
fraudulent. 

I would appreciate if you could find time to 
clarify this issue and confirm the transactions that you 
have made personally. This would help us both to have this 
issue resolved as quickly as possible.

Please find the Word-formatted copy of your account statement is 
enclosed in the archive attached to this message.

Best regards
Kelsey Fuller
Manager of Credit Card Fraud Defense

Attachment: Statement.zip

IP Address: 67.158.232.43

If you do a reverse DNS lookup on this IP you get an IP owned by Pocketinet Communications, Inc, out of Walla Walla, Washington. This company appears to be yet another DSL provider. This likely means that this email was sent by a home user, or maybe a computer in a business that has been 'owned' by a previous malware and is now, yet another zombie computer. This email is supposed to be coming from my credit card company... Um, my credit card company is not a DSL provider in Walla Walla, Washington. If it were from my credit card company, it would be from an IP owned by my credit card company. That fact that it is from a DSL provider means that this is coming from a small company, if not an individual. This is clearly not my credit card company.

'01.09.2008 and 03.09.2008'

This is clearly the dates September 1, 2008 and September 3, 2008. These dates are once again formatted in a non-American style of date. This indicates that it is not coming from someone in the United States.

'Greating '

As is often the case, bad English grammar shows up as another indication of this coming from outside the United States. This should really be 'Greetings' to be correct. The English grammar is actually pretty good on this one, though. It is much better than most.

Binary Attachements

Once again we have a binary attachment - a ZIP file. If you unzip this file, you find something interesting:

Statement_01.doc                             .exe

What we see here is a file with one hundred spaces between the '.doc' and the '.exe' extension. (I shortened the number of spaces above for formatting purposes.) This is really another one of those double file extension binary attachments. This email is again taking advantage of the Windows setting to hide the '.exe' file extension. If you have this extension hidden, as Windows normally does, it looks like 'Statement_01.doc'. This makes it look like it is the Word document it claims to be. But this email goes one step farther and adds those 100 spaces between the '.doc' and the '.exe' extensions. Why do they do this? It is done so that if you are not hiding the file extensions, then the spaces cause the real '.exe' file extension to be moved so far to the right, that you likely won't even see it, if you viewed this file in Windows Explorer. Very clever. So once again we have an EXE that likely contains the program that installs the malware on your computer.

No credit card company name mentioned

The final red flag in this email is the fact that it says it's from your credit card company, but it never says which one! If this email were real it would say something more specific like 'Chase Financial Fraud Services' or something like that. The fact that it is an 'anonymous' email, means it's not from your credit card company. The email is intentionally made to be more generic so that it will be noticed and read by many people, no matter who their credit card company is.

Another day, another scam.

Time for some more malware that uses scare tactics. Here's something I got in my email recently...

Return-Path: <yjm@bossa-hashi.com>
X-Original-To: rick@ekle.us
Received: from 209-16-113-5.net.bhntampa.com (209-16-113-5.net.bhntampa.com [209.16.113.5])
	for <rick@ekle.us>; Fri,  3 Oct 2008 14:33:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Jeffrey Mclean" <yjm@bossa-hashi.com>
To: <rick@ekle.us>
Subject: New Law

I haven't seen you for weeks

New clauses have been added to the legislation regulating your online activities; some of the
operations are now considered illegal. The new law has come into force as of 25.09.2008; the
penalties have been toughened.

Please read the new document and be more accurate further on.

Remember me to your wife

Attachment: Legislation.zip

Let's look at why this is a scam.

25.09.2008

This is clearly supposed to be the date of September (9) 25, 2008. However, this date lists the day of the month before the month. This is not the traditional American style of writing dates. In America this date would likely be written as 9/25/2008. Note how the month is listed first. This implies that this was written by someone who is used to a non-American date style. Since I live in America, that makes this email suspect.

From IP Address: 209.16.113.5

If you do a reverse DNS lookup on this IP address, it returns '09-16-113-5.net.bhntampa.com'. This name appears to be Bright House Networks out of Tampa Florida. This does not appear to be anyone who has any reason to be emailing about my 'illegal online activities'. This makes me suspicious. I looked at what services Bright House Networks provides and these include 'Digital Cable' and 'Digital Phone'. This leads me to believe that this is a cable modem provider in Tampa, Florida. It looks like we have another zombie computer running in some cable modem customer's home.

Note that I got a second one of these emails from IP address 208.119.131.129. This IP address resolves to an IP owned by the Indiana State Library. This appears to be another zombie computer running in a public library in Indiana. Anyone else noticing a pattern here? These malware emails are sent by zombie computers that have already been taken over by other malware programs. These programs are designed to spread themselves in ways that are difficult to stop.

Binary Attachments

Once again, we have a binary attachment. If you extact the contents of that 'Legislation.zip' file, you find the file 'Legislation-25.doc.exe'. An EXE is an executable. It's a program that runs on your computer and does something. This is clearly not some legislation. If it was, it would be a text file (TXT, DOC, RTF, PDF, etc). And what does this EXE program do? It installs the malware on your computer! This is the 'payload' of the attack. Also, notice how the attached file has two extensions: '.doc.exe'. This is another big red flag. Windows is normally set to hide the file extension of any file displayed in Windows Explorer. This means that it would hide the '.exe' part of the filename, giving you 'Legislation-25.doc'. This makes it look like it IS a text file. This double filename extension trick is very common among spam and malware. I haven't scanned this file, but I suspect it's some form of virus/malware.

Strange statements

'Remember me to your wife'. Um, what? This doesn't mean anything. it's not even proper English. This is another red flag that this is coming from someone who doesn't have a good grasp of the English language. Note that I've gotten several of these emails from different people and this line line is different on them. The other email I got like this had the final line of 'See you around', which is a bit more believable.

So there you have it. Another malware disassembled. Always be suspicious of emails like this.

Many iPhone applications present a brief 'splash screen' when starting up. Here's how to make one.

Create a PNG image named 'Default.png'. It must be exactly that filename, case sensitive. Put this in your Resources folder of the project. The application will display this image briefly when the application first loads.

Technically this image isn't supposed to be used as a splash screen. It is supposed to be a image which resembles the running UI of your application. It's purpose is to make the application show something while it is starting up. By doing this, it doesn't look like the application has frozen while starting up. Despite this, most people just use this feature as a splash screen.

With the NDA finally lifted, it's time for my first quick iPhone SDK article.

Recently, I developed an iPhone application for a company a friend of mine works for. The application worked well, but when the application was complete, the one thing missing was the icon in iTunes for the application. Whenever I built the application and imported it into iTunes, instead of the proper application icon, which I had properly defined, I kept getting a plain black icon with an 'A' shape in it - In other words it kind of looks like the Interface Builder icon, but in monocrome on a black background. I tried everything I could think of to fix this. I searched all the iPhone SDK documentation. I found references to a 512x512 image you had to create for the app for this, but there was no information that I could find as to WHERE to put it. Finally, in frustration, I emailed another iPhone SDK developer who already had a published iPhone application and asked him how to do it. He responded back and gave me the solution.

In short, create a JPEG image named 'iTunesArtwork' without any file extension. Put it in your project so it's in the Resources folder. When the application is build, this file will end up in the root directory of your *.app package. It is this file that iTunes looks for to display as the application icon in iTunes. I believe the icon really should be 512x512 pixels, for best appearance, but a smaller icon will work.

I hope this helps someone get past this seemingly undocumented requirement. Good Luck

This is the best news about the iPhone that I've read in months!

The iPhone is a great device to develop for. The problem is, it can be a very difficult device to program for, especially if you are not an expert at Objective-C and Mac programming in general. I am one of those people who is not an expert at this stuff. As such, I am often looking for help as to how to fix certain programming problems I encounter while programming. So what would I normally do in this case? Google! The problem is, the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) that all iPhone developers sign (including myself) forbids anyone from talking about how to program the iPhone. This means you are essentially on your own. If you can't find it in the Apple documentation, you are out of luck. You have to figure it out on your own. This is despite the fact that there are thousands of other iPhone developers out there, one of which is sure to have encountered the same problem and knows how to fix it.

This forced silence placed on all developers had hurt the iPhone development market in huge ways. There is a huge amount of knowledge out there but noone can access it. By now, there should be hundreds, if not thousands of articles out there on the Internet as to how to program various parts of the iPhone. There are finished books on how to program the iPhone that can't be published because of the NDA. There are no doubt many open source programs, modules etc. for the iPhone that can't be published for the iPhone.

Today all that changed. Apple finally relented and dropped the NDA. From the announcement, it is also very clear that Apple is doing this begrudgingly. The announcement is very politely worded, but if you 'read between the lines' of the announcement, it's clear that they are doing this because they received a flood of complaints and bad press for keeping it up.

The floodgates have finally been opened. We'll very rapidly start to see books being published, articles being published, open source code being made available, and discussion groups being opened. (One already has been). I hope that now that this information is available, we'll start to see a great increase in the quality of published iPhone apps in the future. Due to the lack of information previously we've been stuck with a lot of frankly, low-quality software. That will now change. I can't wait to see what happens. Suddenly I'm enthusiastic about iPhone development again.

Ok, time to discuss another malware email that I received today. I wanted to describe this so that I can help others learn to identify scam/malware emails. The body of the email is as follows:

Return-Path: <monitoring@isp.com>
X-Original-To: rick@ekle.us
Received: from isp.com (unknown [192.206.246.200])
    	for <rick@ekle.us>; Tue, 23 Sep 2008 05:12:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: monitoring@isp.com
To: rick@ekle.us
Subject: Your internet access is going to get suspended
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 07:12:49 -0500

Dear Sir! 

The Internet Service Provider Consorcium was made to protect the rights of software
authors, artists. We conduct regular wiretapping on our networks, to monitor
criminal acts.

We are aware of your illegal activities on the internet which were originating from 

You can check the report of your activities in the past 6 months that we have
attached. We strongly advise you to stop your activities regarding the illegal
downloading of copyrighted material or your internet access will be suspended.
 Sincerely 
 ISC monitoring team

Attachment: user-EA3911X-activities.zip 

Ok, so how do I know this is a scam? Let's describe each in detail.

From Email Address: monitoring@isp.com

First of all, this email address is very generic. 'isp.com' is not the domain name of my ISP. Had this been the domain name of my ISP, I might be inclined to believe it is real. Because this is a very generic name it is clearly fake. However, to the uneducated, they may think that it is their ISP sending this instead of a generic 'ISP'. Plus, the from email address of an email is easily faked. These should never be trusted.

From IP Address: 192.206.246.200

The IP address that sent an email cannot be faked. Had this email truly been from my IP address, it would have been within an IP range owned by my ISP. I just looked up the geographic location of this IP and it returned that it is from the 'CARROLLTON-FARMERS BRANCH INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DIST'. In other words, it's a school in Texas somewhere. I live in Florida. My ISP is not a school in Texas! This email likely came from a 'zombie' computer in a gradeschool district in Texas somewhere.

'Consorcium'

Misspellings are often a sign of scam emails. The misspelled word 'Consorcium' in the email is a blatant sign that this email is fake. The correct spelling is 'consortium', by the way, as any spell-checker will tell you.

Scare Tactics

This message is clearly meant to try to scare you. It accuses you of engaging in illegal activity on the Internet. It basically threatens you to open the attached file or you will lose your Internet access. Suddenly you are afraid of not only losing your Internet access but of going to jail! A true email on this subject would likely be much more polite.

Zip file attachments

Any time I see an attachment that is a ZIP or an EXE I instantly get very suspicious. This attachment is usually the malware program. You unzip the attachment, run the EXE inside and your computer is infected. I downloaded this attachment (very carefully) and viewed the contents. It contains a file named 'user-EA3911X-activities.exe'. Clearly this is not a record of your 'violations'. If it were it would likely be in a text file or a Word document or something similar. An EXE means this is a program. Were you to run this program it would likely infect your computer. However, when I attempted to extract this program so i can scan it with my virus checker to see what kind of virus/malware it is, my unzip program reported that the zip file was corrupt! These stupid malware people can't even send a valid zip file!

So there you have it. My quick and dirty analysis of this scam email. I hope this saves you from having to fall victim to this scam.

 

This has not been a good week. It seems to be my week of injuries.

First, on Saturday evening, I was drinking some water and stupidly trying to talk at the same time. As a result, I ended up inhaling a good mouthful of water. That did not go over well. Instantly I'm choking and gasping for breath. For what felt like a long time I couldn't breathe. It was like my lungs were made of stone. They just would not work. Thankfully, I finally coughed up the water and was able to breathe again. Once this whole incident was over, I'm there finally able to breathe, and with tears flowing down my face. After this, my eyes started to bother me, so I took out my contact lenses. While doing so, I noticed that my eyes were suddenly bright red and heavily bloodshot. I later found out that when you choke like that it causes blood vessels in your eyes to burst. That's what caused the badly bloodshot eyes.

Later that same evening, I was helping my brother take something out of his car. I leaned too close to the hot exhaust pipe and managed to burn my leg - a nice perfectly curved burn mark on my leg.

And finally, on Monday evening, the king of all health screw ups. I was walking around the house, made a bad step and proceeded to sprain the ankle of my other foot! I now have a burn on one foot and a sprained ankle on the other foot.

After several days of a sore ankle, I finally decided to go by the 'non-emergency' medical clinic last night to get my ankle checked out. It was starting to get swollen and black and blue. At the clinic, they took a few x-rays and thankfully no broken bones. just a sprain. The doctor also said my bones looked very good. He gave me an Ace bandage to wrap my ankle with and told me to take three Advil with each meal three times a day. So I stopped by the nearby Publix and bought some. Yes, that's right. Rick "Mr. No Pills" bought some pills. I'll try not to take many. The pain isn't that bad.

So there you have the story of my painful week. I NEVER go to doctors and I rarely get injured. I guess my string of good luck in that area caught up with me - bigtime!