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I got a real gem in my inbox the other day. Now, we all know about the dangers of phishing scams, and I’ve gotten them in various forms over the years. The latest attempt, posing as Paypal account security, takes the cake, so I just have to share. The subject line reads thus:

Please Restore Yuour Acount Access

I couldn’t help but laugh. If you can’t tell from that alone that it’s bogus, maybe a couple exerpts will help.

Paypal is constantly working to ensure security by regulary screening the accounts in our system.We recently reviewed your account,and we need more information to help us provide you with secure service.Until we can collect this information,your access to sensitive account features will be limited.We would like to restore your acces as soon as possible,and we apologize for the inconvenience.

That paragraph is just as it appeared in the message, misspellings and poor grammar included. Further along in the message was the explanation concerning my supposed account limitations:

We would like to ensure that your account was not accessed by an unauthorized third party.Becouse protecting the security of your account is our primary concern,we have limited access to sensitive Paypal account features.

Let’s recap for the sake of being thorough. Apparently the folks at Paypal have enough sense to run a (thus-far) successful business but haven’t the slightest clue when it comes to basic grammatical principles such as leaving a space after punctuation. They also cannot spell the words your, account, regularly, and because. Furthermore, since they still haven’t acquired a domain name, I can reach them at the address 62.81.142.158 or I can just login to their account server at 145.236.228.89.

This concludes our lesson in phishing tomfoolery.

While cleaning out my attic the other day I came across some old goodies. So, let’s embark on a trek… back in time!

Nintendo has recently made a big splash in the gaming waters with its motion-sensitive Wii, but this isn’t the first time Nintendo’s been involved in motion-related technology. Around 1989, Broderbund released the U-Force, a fold-up motion-sensing device based on infrared technology. It came with a T-bar and two handles that could act as a makeshift flight-yolk, and a sensor bar that I could never figure out. In order to get it to work, you had to configure switches based on the game you were playing. The only problem is, while the idea was certainly novel, it failed miserably when it came to actual execution.

The other major find was the remnants of my old 386 SX20, the second computer I ever took apart, and the first gaming computer I ever had. Before this I had an IBM 8088, complete with state-of-the-art amber-colored graphics. I learned a lot from the 8088, but it was this 386 that became the launching point for a life of upgrades and spare parts.

This machine had a 20mhz processor, four megs of EDO RAM, and an 80 meg hard drive. I later upgraded it with a 4x CD-ROM drive (top of the line!), a Sound Blaster 16, and even a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive (which took no small amount of effort to get running). I had some games on the old 8088, but this is where I really cut my gaming teeth. Classics like Space Quest, SimCity, and Wolfenstein 3D brought the true wonders of PC gaming to my attention.

It’s hard to tell if computing has gotten simpler or more complicated since then. I suppose in some ways it’s simpler, while more complex in others. Back then, DOS was still a primary operating environment for gaming, and you had to configure your system effectively to get the most from your games. Often, a boot disk was necessary to free up extended memory (remember SmartDrive, and himem.sys?) for some games to even load. The hardware was simpler, all you really needed was a fast enough processor and enough RAM. Nowadays, while the act of loading a game doesn’t take as much effort, there are many hardware options to choose from with both hardware and software compatibility to think about. Maybe ten to fifteen years from now I’ll be digging my current machine out of a box in the attic and remeniscing all over again.

For roughly two decades computer users have been well-acquainted with the desktop user interface. Starting with Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft’s Windows 1.0, the desktop has been a mouse-driven experience as opposed to the command prompt. While the desktop UI has evolved since then, the core concept remains unchanged.

Introducing BumpTop, a prototype desktop UI based on physics. Gone are the two-dimensional icons of yesterday. BumpTop presents you with a desktop area and three-dimensional icons that can be grouped and rearranged using the same old drag and drop combined with mouse-gestures and context menus. The theory behind this system is intuitive organization. In other words, you can arrange your computer desktop using groups and piles, much like you might do for documents on your real-world desktop.

I don’t use my desktop much for stashing documents, but this is an interesting concept nonetheless. Being able to stash things in organized and easily-searchable piles could make large projects easier to manage.

“I Just Bought Your Hard Drive”

To sum up the article, Hank Gerbus went to Best Buy to have his hard drive replaced after a crash. They replaced the drive, but would not let him take the crashed drive home with him, citing a need to send it out to a repair center to fulfill warranty terms. From there, Mr. Gerbus was told that holes would be drilled into the drive to prevent its use in the future. Six months later, he got a call from a man named Ed who had bought his repaired drive at a flea market. The drive still contained important personal data, like the phone number for Mr. Gerbus’ Florida home.

This why you need to be careful about what you buy, and where you get it. I’ve seen plenty of repackaged merchandise on store shelves. It’s even harder to tell when buying online. Granted, you may get better prices in general, but the best prices are for OEM hardware. OEM merchandise typically arrives in nothing but an anti-static bag surrounded by packing material. You can’t tell what’s been restocked and what hasn’t.

The moral of the story is, always buy a freshly sealed retail box. If you buy at a store, feel free to ask plenty of questions about the warranty process (not the policy, the actual process), and always check your item for stickers that mark it as a restocked item, or wrapping that may not be factory sealed.

All right, so I’m actually a bit late with this post since I really finished the upgrade two weeks ago or so. I haven’t done any work on this machine for about two years, so I felt it was about time. I picked up an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard and a 3.2ghz Pentium 4. Naturally, something just has to go wrong whenever I work on my computer, and it only happens to this machine.

First, I had a problem installing Windows 2000. The setup just could not copy files properly. Thankfully, I have the laptop sitting next to me and a wireless router on my DSL connection, so after a little research I found out that it was likely a memory problem. I popped out one of the sticks of RAM and Windows installed fine. Great, I thought, we’re doing all right now. Wrong. Reinstalling that stick of RAM caused Windows to blue screen during startup. I haven’t seen a blue screen of death in several years, and now here it was, coming back to haunt me. Solution: I had only bought one 512 stick of PC3200 as I already had one. Both were Mushkin, but the one I bought was apparently a slightly new build, and dual-channel boards really like two identical sticks. Buying another stick has since remedied the problem.

Just when I thought all was well, the graphics problems started. Windows would load, the mouse cursor would turn strange colors and only move horizontally. Moments later the machine would lock and require a hard reset. Apparently the fan on my video card was shot and it was overheating. Screw it, I figured. I’ve come this far, so let’s just top it all off with a Radeon X800XT. Everything runs so beautifully now. Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines; they all run flawlessly. Morrowind now runs like I believe it was intended, with almost negligible load times.

So very nice.

If you have any deeper involvement with your computer aside from checking your AOL mail, then you’ve probably had to use Task Manager to stop a problematic program. Process Explorer is like a beefed up Task Manager, allowing you access to much more than just the currently running processes. You can track processes, the handles those processes are using (i.e. all of the directories, files, and registry keys that svchost.exe is using), and descriptions of the DLLs a process loads along with the company that made them.

Grab a copy from Sysinternals Freeware.

It was a minor adventure, but the laptop is up and running happily. Having never cracked open a laptop before (at least not with the intentions of having it run flawlessly when I was done) I approached the project with a bit of trepidation. Luckily, it’s almost easier than building a desktop machine.

• Asus chassis with a 15.4″ SXGA screen
• Intel Pentium M clocked at 2.0ghz
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
• 60 gig IBM/Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm hard drive.
• 1 gig of Mushkin 333mhz PC2700 RAM
• Interchangeable 24X/24X/8X/24X DVD+CD-RW Combo

The part list is basically the same as I posted earlier, but here are the details.

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