Coffee Shop Discoveries: WiFi SD & More

Sitting at my favorite coffee shop in Cambridge Mass (not the overpriced Starbucks by the way), I realized that someone has left their wireless Linksys router wide open for me to borrow. First, a big thank you to all people who enable skimmers like myself to self indulge in Java and the Internet simultaneously. If it weren't for all of you, I would always be a lonely geek in a coffee shop. Now I have my coffee, and the entire Internet to keep me company! Still a geek though.... :)

Anyway, enough of that. As I was surfing on this incredibly fast connection (must be the medical scanning place next door....good security guys), I realized that the big bulky pocket pc phone sitting in my pocket had an SD card. Recently, I remember visiting the SanDisk site (the Kodak of flash type memory cards), where they had posted a new SD product in development. Yes yes, a SD WiFi card!

This was the true epitome of complete connectivity. Now powered with my Pocket PC Phone Edition, I have a complete Windows OS, Outlook, Word, Excel, and custom apps included, as well as a high speed internet connection. I checked SanDisk's web site, and they just released the WiFi product last week!

So as incredibly excited as I was, I went to order the product online. No ordering is available online.... :(

Oh my god! Here I am surfing the internet on a borrowed (fast!) connection, looking up new products for the mobile tech solution that would save incredible amounts of time regardless of location, and the site has NO ordering mechanism for the new product!

Come on Sandisk, you released, but having all the goods in your warehouse with engineers marveling at their latest tech invention (almost looking at it like a crime!) is not going to sell to us geeks on borrowed connections!

I await...wait....shoot my connection just went dead.....

DDOS: Attack to the SPAM-Clones

Found an interesting article on MSNBC discussing how SPAM blacklists are the new target of DDOS attacks. Attacks as recent as this week have been victims of major DDOS attacks knocking them offline.

Be forewarned, this article makes many assumptions and even tries to create assumption that recent viruses are coming and being created by the SPAM community. No matter how recent the viruses, creating them defeats the purpose of spammers since servers and computers would not be able to receive their marketing due to downtime and network congestion. This theory seems to be a blame-game and not very well thought out. A spammer's dream would be a free and open connection delivering messages as fast as possible to every single user.

Email Client: Something New Please

I have been searching for the past year for a good replacement for my email client. Many of you will remember that I raved about the new Outlook 2003. As a beta user, it is very functional and has very few issues that I noticed. But Outlook is heavy and a weighted application. The graphics are nice, but it has noticable lag (the machine I use is a nice 1.8 ghz laptop). In search of something new....

I finally found something completly free that has an excellent skinable interface, IMAP and POP3 compliance, and best of all...it's very FAST. The Mozilla Thunderbird project has released an excellent mail client with all the essential features and functionality of Outlook 2003.

I recently installed it on a fresh copy of Windows XP, the program blew me away... Give it a shot, I will keep you updated of little features I find. By the way, like most open source, it is platform independent :)

Download Mozilla Thunderbird

SoBig.F Update

While looking for more information on this new annoying virus, I came across an interesting statement about SoBig.F. Apparently, after September 10th, the worm stops sending email and immediatly exists if it is run. There is an element of the worm that checks NTP (Time) Server on the internet; the worm is probably checking if the date has passed September 10th.

Well overall, this is a sigh of relief, however, this worm could easily be adapted to execute in a different manner where it would not end on a certain date. In addition, if it was hidden in a zip file, or a file that normal users open, this can be disasterous.

Here is the original article

SoBig.F is So Wrong! Virus Information & Update

As you may be aware, the SoBig.F virus is wild and on the loose across the internet. It seem that every week or two, a new virus with potential harmful results is set loose on the internet. As you may be aware, all incoming emails are checked by rjsNetworks for potential viruses and spam. The SoBig.F virus is being automatically removed from incoming email, however, your outgoing mail is not being scanned in order to protect your privacy.

1. If you are receiving emails with Viruses, you may or may not be infected. Receiving the email does not necessarily qualify your computer from being infected.

2. Make sure you are running a virus scanner on your local PCs. This particular worm can originate from an infected disk or from the internet (very similar to Code Red)
For removal instructions, visit Symantec SoBig.F

3. More information about this worm including network damage etc can be found at CNN here.

Many customers are wondering how the emails seem so legitimate. That is, this virus most likely seems like it is addressed to a specific email address at your company and looks legitimate. Simply, all the email addresses out on your web site can be harvested or scanned as described here.

Internet Explorer Status Bar in Win XP

For more information and other tips/tricks

Everytime I open up IE in XP, my status bar is hidden and not show. Other than being irritating, it has become a habit for me to click View > Status Bar everytime I browse the web. After a bit of research, fix this problem by following the below steps. Please note, you will be adjusting your registry values, we recommend you make a backup of your registry and assume no resposibility for the below instructions (they have worked for us everytime however!)

Start with one instance of IE. Select View | Status Bar

Click 'Advanced' find your user name in the list & click 'edit' button put a check next to 'Set value' under 'Deny'

Thanks to everyone below for the comments; keep them coming :)

RPC causing issues on your PC?

Did you get a message this week on your Windows machine that claimed RPC had crashed? Yep, it is another worm on the Internet that is spreading quickly. Here is a link for more information.

Effective Tools Against DDOS Attacks

DDOS stands for Distributed Denial Of Service. Basically this means that attackers around the internet are coordinating an attack together from a particular website (generally, could be a mail server etc).

In the past few years, DDOS attacks range from automated passive worm attacks, to mass coordinated attacks on one victim. Really there is not much you can do. But there are some prevention tools you can use if you are using Apache:

About DDOS
mod_DosEvasive
mod_Throttle

Linux Help & Information

You are really curious about Linux. The new admitted competition to Microsoft in Enterprise Applications and Operating Systems...blah!

We have been working with Linux for the past three years....and we love it! From stability and rock solid free information on the web, the opertaing system really shines as a dedicated machine serving a dedicated purpose. Take a look at the following articles and web site for easy to read/understand information.

Here is once cool project we found: A Free Linux Tivo

Need to Get News - Use NewsGator

So you are a news junkie. Take a look at NewsGator. With this utility you can subscribe to Weblogs, news sites, or any syndicated content in RSS format. Rather than visiting sites everyday, drop them into your Outlook client:

Music Info Anyone

Not usual in our posts, but a plug over to a good friend of ours here at rjsNetworks. If you are looking for any Music related information/products, take a look at KellysMusicAndComputers.com:

Kelly's Music & Computers Blog - M-Audio Buys Evolution...

Free Email - Without Spam

So we were hopeful to find a good free web based email account without the clutter and spam. If you have an account with us, you can get your own webmail at no cost. What we wanted to test was the popular email addresses out there, specificaly Hotmail, Yahoo, and MSN.

We all have our 'real' email accounts, then we have a few aliases, and a few accounts we use purely for information and garbage collection. I personally have a few I use for different purposes without my personal email box being hijacked.

Up front, Hotmail is the worst mailbox filler ever. Within two days of starting our test, we had more email with unsolicited information than emails sent since the account was opened. Microsoft owns Hotmail and seems to sell lists to credit card companies around the nation. Or then again, there is a directory that can be searched with a simple harvesting program.

On the other hand, my Yahoo account has never ever had SPAM. That is right, it is customizable, has POP3 access, and has some very powerful spam features. (Not quite as powerful as ours, but decent!). The only thing I don't like about Yahoo...the amount of adverts that are in each interface. What do expect for free....I would rather see these filtered ads, than Microsoft's email filler every other minute with unfiltered pornographic matierial.

You pick, Hotmail or Yahoo?

Some More Info On Spam and Hotmail

Ryan's blog gives some insight on how spammers are harvesting email addresses just by opening their email. Basically, every image that is downloaded by your email client is linked to your email addresses and stored by the spammers for further abuse.

Read Ryan's blog to learn about how spammers are using this information to further exploit your personal inbox.

Ryan Lowe's Blog: Images in Hotmail Junk Mail

Viruses Get Smart[er]

A new virus has recently hit the internet with storm. Here are just the facts about this virus:

rjsNetworks.com is monitoring this new virus closely. The latest problem is called "worm/MiMail.A," also known as W32.Mimail.A@mm. It's a mass-mailing Internet worm that started spreading late Friday afternoon, and according to Central Command. This worm disguises itself by arriving as a zip file which most scanning programs allow. A zip file is usually a method of condensing information so it can move faster over the Internet. If a user clicks on the attachment, the worm is launched and creates a mass-mailing of itself, which may clog mail servers or degrade network performance.

If any emails are received from admin@anydomain.com, do not open any attachments contained in the message. As the internet is challenged with new viruses, now contained in ZIP files, it is important to keep our users up to date with potential risks to their systems.

To remove this virus follow these instructions