I was handed a laptop the other day which was assumed to have been infected with some horrible trojans,rootkits,and/or viruses. As I am always curious about these kind of things I decided to take the time and have a look to see

#1 what was going on and

#2 if I could get it cleaned up.

The First thing I did was to grab my trusted malwarebytes.org latetest version of Anti-Malware – it’s been able to bring back a couple of machines for me in the past so I decided to run it and it came back — clean.

The owner is fastidiously careful with their surfing habits and as such there weren’t any problems that I was able to find with an initial scan. however going through the motions that I do I noticed that the disk was highly fragmented. Nothing new there a few passes with defrag and things will be back to a decent speed.

NOTE: this system was running NTFS but I had found that the disk system was performing horribly when I moved a large archive from the system partition to the recovery partition. so slow in fact that I assumed that the hard drive might be failing. S.M.A.R.T did not show any warning so I started to look into the file system.

I let Defrag run overnight and there was not a bit of an improvement. I opened up the report and found an interesting entry in the description of the MFT. it had over 50 fragments! Now Had this been a Vista or Windows 7 Machine this problem would not be a technical issue, However, With XP it is.

I found a few programs that could solve this issue and I am happy to report that once the MFT fragmentation was cleared up the computer booted up in about 90 seconds. compared to the greater than 10 minutes or longer prior to the fix being implemented.

So it might nit be a virus or a failing drive or a full registry after all. Check to see if your MFT is fragmented and you might be able to get back some performance you lost on your XP machine.

Or you could just upgrade to Windows 7 and have to reinstall all your Applications and hope your hardware has signed drivers. I’m guessing that the Defrag is the less painful option for most of you.

Let me know if this helped you out at all in the comments section.

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Tired of SPAM? Who isn’t? Want to discourage more of it but don’t know how? in this post I’m going to go through how you can find out who it is by decoding a http://bit.ly/ link and sending the affiliate or other network the info that whoever is promoting this offer is sending SPAM.

Now on to the genesis of this article.

I received an email the other day that was obviously SPAM. How can you tell if it’s spam? it’s all about the to: field. (the … are mine) This to address looks to be set up as a group on a larger Web site that is being used to spam a scraped email list. Of course that’s not my email address so I looked at the cc: and I saw the telltale sign of spam. there were a lot of emails that started with “cs”. my email starts with “csciu” and is not in the short list on my email client so I doubt I’m going to figure out who sent this SPAM my way unless I get the security department of this large web site involved.

So , How do I track them down? If I can’t immediately trace it back I’m not going to take the time to get in a dialog with a security department as I don’t really want to threaten a multi-billion dollar company. I’d rather stay under the radar.

So Here’s what I did.

all throughout the SPAM message I see the same link repeated over and over

http://bit.ly/[removed]

“stupid bit.ly tricks”

I don’t want to just click on the link I might get malware/spyware/trojans sent my way so I do the cautious thing. I add a + (plus symbol) to the end of the link. so copy and paste into the browser and added the + and voilà I have  all kinds of juicy data about this link.  I have the destination url without it just redirecting me to the offer of a legit offer. but I also can see how many other have clicked on it and when I looked it was over 22,000 in the past month.

I look at the  URL  which turns out to be safe it’s just  a sales page link to a clickbank.com hosted product.   I can tell by the  hoplink.clickbank.com at the end  but the rest of it i’s encrypted to prevent me from knowing what product and who’s affiliate link it is.

Not To Worry!

I just have to  go to http://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_decoding.htm and enter the link which will look like this

and you get your spammers clickbank user ID:  which in this case was ” bokharapk ” now all I have to do is report this affiliate here : http://www.clickbank.com/reportproblem.html

Now I’m sure one or two reports are not going to make life horrible for this guy but if others of you have had this garbage sent to your email and you also contact Clickbank then with enough complaints Clickbank will make this guys life more difficult even withhold payment. If we make it harder to get paid the spam will be reduced.

Sadly with the costs so low to send millions of emails these days and the robotic software that makes it simple to collect millions even billions of email addresses there will always be spam. But with the tools we have at our hands , we can uncover the legitimate companies like clickbank who are being abused as we are. Clickbank will take action against the bad actors out there to protect their own corporate image. and this will send the message to spammers that says “if you spam you don’t get paid.” and since it’s all about the money for Spammers this is the power we have to get this email clogging garbage off our systems.

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Look here – > http://listoftheday.blogspot.com/2008/06/21-ridiculous-tattoos-of-celebrities.html

What happened to just buying tickets  or just watching a show?  These are some wonderful examples of folks who took being a fan a little too far.

I get that you love a celebrity but come on? tat’s I’m sure the person is going to go out of fashion eventually. besides they can always do something that makes you hate them at some point in the future and when that happens you’ll need  money for a tat removal or won’t you feel silly.

Then again everyone is so self-involved these days I doubt anyone will notice.

It used to be a real statement to get a tattoo now days  it’s just another trendy thing to do.  boring.

So I guess that link there is what not to do when it comes to getting a tat.

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got an older PS3- look out!

According to the bbc web site Sony is having trouble with their online network which affects the older “Fat” model consoles.  they are quoted as saying “We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system.” Granted with any High Tech product there will be problems and the Playstation I’m sure is not better or worse than offerings from Microsoft or Nintendo.

the article went on to quote Sony as saying  ”In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.”

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I’m going to start off by stating something that a lot of folks will agree with, Verizon wireless is a good cellular provider.

As a company Meh- They are very much like every other company.  A couple of months ago I went out and picked up a USB wireless Internet card from them. Going with Verizon was an easy choice as I had been issued a Verizon Wireless Internet card (or whatever they are called these days) for my work.  It worked  great and all that so I figured since  I have a little netbook might as well set it up and have a portable where I can work from anywhere and have an always on ISP no more searching out Hotspts and that garbage. So I go to the Verizon store. Once there I talk to a guy who interrogates me as to why I’m there,  and proceeds to ensure that I enter in my name and info into a master computer. All this so I can wait for someone who will help me out with the specifics. Now I have grown up in the Washington DC area and in Virginia our DMV utilizes a similar system.  You go in, wait in a line where a person asks you in a similar accusatory tone “why are you here?” and unlike Verizon actually makes sure you have what you need to have to get your forms and plates that you are there for, then, they print out a number and you go to wait.  Back to Verizon-  I wander about the store for a few minutes  and eventually I hear my name and  I  talk to the guy who will help me. We sort out the details and he rings up the transaction , credit check etc… approval needed and comes after another phone call, I do more  shuffling about. no problem here nor with the subsequent return of said card which for what ever reason my eeePC just didn’t want to play with.  all in all true to the slogan they have about it being haslle free.

I know what you are thinking this article is  BORING!  so what he bought something, Verizon is great company and all that why the title? this is where the controversy is happening right here .. this next part is either sheer genius or utter incompetence. I’ve not decided which nor do I really care but I wanted to write about someting today and this seemed like a good topic.

WHAT HAPPENED?

I got a collection notice from Verizon yesterday. well not from Verizon but from an actual collections company. it was for less than $10 which is why I’m thinking it genius.  granted I’m curious lad so I started calling about and confused as I was about this notice since I don’t currently have Verizon service and didn’t receive any bills from them for the 4 months prior to this rather ominous looking notice going out.  of course my first thought is call the company who sent me the letter. dead-end just a recording reciting the applicable Federal law about how this is an attempt to collect a debt blah blah blah.  so I see they have a verizon account number great I’ll call Verizon and work it out with them.  so I find a customer support number and what is the first thing that the recording tele-bot asks for? my 10 digit verizon phone number. I don’t have one!  so I hit a few buttons which take me to a dead end of muzak and eventually hangs up on me. so I try the number again and this time navigate faster through to tell them I want english and eventually found a way to enter my account upon which I was connected  to pleasant sounding woman who was in their Recovery department.

(PRO TIP: when calling a compnay who thinks you owe them money BE NICE!  the person you are talking to is a lot more like you than you realize. when you treat me nice I act a whole lot more polite and accommodating than if you berate me and have an atitude about the whole thing. If that’s your approach forget it, these companies are set up in such a way that for you to talk to the beancounter who set up the computer system to rape your wallet you would have to hire him as a consultant.in other words you’re never going to get that satisfaction so let it go.)

our conversation went a bit like this

Verizon Wireless:hello how may I help you today
Me: (confused tonalty) I’m a little confused at the moment. I just Received a collection notice telling me I owed Verizon some money but you guys haven’t sent me any bills and I don’t have service, I’m just trying to find out if this is legitimate or not.”
Verizon Wireless: what is your account number?
Me: (reads them acount number from notice)
THe operator Verified the info in the letter. then offers me a phone number to talk to someone in another department to better help me.
Me: that would be great

Verizon Wireless: here is the number XXX-XXX-XXXX is there anything else I can assist you with….
Me: no thanks have a nice weekend

Verizon Wireless: have nice weekend
(end call)
I’ve now spent 15 minutes on this $10 collection notice. but now I’m invested so I’ll call the next number

Verizon Wireless system prompts me for info and I select English – “all agents are busy please wait and your call will be answered.” (wait 2 minutes – then line goes dead)
I call back select English then wait 3 minutes and have a nice conversation (I was not paying attention after being on hold for this time period so I won’t transcribe it) and they look up my account and tell me that since I had returned it within the time period that I don’t owe the money and that they will cancel the collections and that my account is fine now.
so this call took 10 more minutes. so a total of 20 minutes and I was online doing things while on hold so all in all I think it was less time wasted than driving over the Verizon store overall.

I’m on the fence as to what happened here, as a Technology Professional I understand all the things that have to go right to prevent this kind of hting from happening. I also wonder if Verizon is hoping to make a few bucks off of sending for collections accounts that are not really due in the hopes that people will see an amount under $10 annd just pay it. since it’s being done by ano outside company and it’s got to do with a collections agency people will figure it’s an old debt and just pay it out of shame or guilt or just simply because it’s easier to go online and anonymously pay the money and go about your day. Imagine if it’s just a dumb screw up and it nets a few hundred Grand for Verizon. Makes a little part of me want to own the stock.

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