Posted on the November 30th, 2009 under Technology by Al
A coworker received his disturbing spam email the day before Thanksgiving.
________________________________________
From: w5wade@eastlink.ca [w5wade@eastlink.ca]
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 6:11 AM
Subject: Keep very secretxxx
This is Scot, head MZP Squad. I wish to let you know that i have been paid by a client to assasinate you at convenience. I have never met you before, but they gave me the full description of your identity
The reason why they want you dead was never not disclosed to me. My guys are now contantly watching you waiting for my
instruction to terminate you at convenience.
THIS IS MY MESSAGE:
Listen very well, the Police cannot do much to help you out in this right now because you are being watched,any such attempt is very risky and can push us to terminate your life without any other option.
We DON NOT want any trace whatsoever. So, you are advise to send your reply within 48hrs to: johnsonp46163@msn.com
WARNING: Like you have been told, any attempted attempt to involve third party will be too bad
Bye for now
Obviously, she was disturbed by the message. Who wouldn’t be. As best as I can tell, the goal of the message is to solicit an email response to verify that your email address is valid and then the flood gates (of spam) are open. If you receive this email, or something similar, just delete it.
Nintendo has dropped the price of the Wii by $50 to $199.99. We’ve enjoyed playing various games on the Wii. There are games for everyone in the family, from the preschoolers to the grandparents. One of my favorite games to play is the Soccer Practice which comes with the Wii Fit Balance Board (sold separately). I do poorly because I crack up when I get hit in the head with a soccer shoe.
The Nintendo Wii is for the causal gamers, which makes it perfect for family game night.
I purchased and installed the Mac OS X Snow Leopard update. I knew it wasn’t going to bring a lot of new features but the reviews touted modest performance gains and a few UI gems.
I installed it as a fresh install, not an upgrade, on my 18 month old Macbook Pro with 4 GB of memory. After using it for three days, I have to say I’m disappointed and think it should have been a free upgrade. I’m glad it only cost $30.
Online reviews and comments claim a noticeable increase in performance. I’m wondering if this is the infamous Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field in affect. Here’s are my experiences so far:
I’ve seen more spinning beach balls (i.e. waiting for the app or OS) in the last 3 days than I have in the last 3 months, especially with Safari 4. Firefox 3.5 has been running fine, without a visit by the spinning beach ball.
iMovie is also slow. Trying to edit video clips is painful because it pauses for 2-3 seconds.
Mail.app crashed for the first time in a year, if not longer. I’ve had it lock up occasionally under Leopard, but it only took 1 day for it to crash with an error message in Snow Leopard. This may have to do with the Microsoft Exchange email that I added today, which is a new feature so I can understand this one.
I’m anxiously awaiting the 10.6.1 update. I will not be installing Snow Leopard on my iMac until 10.6.1 comes out and proves itself worthy on my Macbook Pro… unless I revert back to Leopard that is.
I’ve been using Windows 7 Release Candidate exclusively on my work desktop since it came out on May 5, 2009. It runs great but I’ve encountered one problem that is extremely annoying. The windows behind the active window will flicker.
I like Twitter (see this video that explains Twitter). I use it as a means of communication with my immediate family. I have also pluggedinto it as a source of news. Initially I was interested in tech news, comments, rumors, etc. While tech info is still a primary interest, I found myself expanding the people I follow o Twitter to others I found interesting regardless if they are marketers, lawyers, librarians, etc. Using TweetDeck I am able to follow a good number (albeit a relatively small number compared to hardcore Twitter users) of diverse people and grouping them into different categories. Using this approach I have a Family & Friends group, a Tech Heads group, and a Locals group which includes people from the Chicagoland, Rockford and southeast Wisconsin.
These groups allow me to see what’s going on in tech, in business and in the local area. It allowed me to get a feel for the extent of a recent power outage in McHenry county. When ex-Illinois governor “Blago” was impeached my Locals group was abuzz with the news.
Twitter is a great way for me to get regional, national and tech news. If I’m at a computer, I’ll typically have it running so I can stay plugged in. If I need to work without distraction I’ll turn it off, but I do feel disconnected.
I picked up my copy of iLife 09 the day it came out, eager to try out iPhoto’s face recognition feature. After launching iPhoto for the first time, it took under an hour for it to process all the photos in the library, searching for faces. Once it identified most of the faces you start tagging them with names. As you are tagging names, the process becomes simpler because iPhoto appears to learn from what was being tagged and makes recommendations which you can accept or reject. It’s not perfect and at times suggests the wrong person, especially when it comes to toddlers and infants, but does a fairly good job.
An example of an accurate suggestion:
An example of an inaccurate suggestion:
iPhoto is also Linux friendly, well at least in terms of recognizing Tux:
iPhoto also likes to play Where’s Waldo:
Overall it is an impressive feature. I can’t speak to how it compares to the face recognition feature of Google’s Picasa, other than iPhoto does all the work locally whereas Picasa only provides face recognition on Picasa Web. I’m not about to upload my entire photo library to the web (with the exception of my Amazon S3 backup) so the local face recognition with name tagging is perfect for me.
Twitter is a great, when it works. All it takes is a Steve Jobs keynote or a Presidential Inauguration to bring out the infamous Fail Whale. Unfortunately Twitter’s approach to deal with its up-time issues is to reduce functionality and limit developer access as explained in this Webware article.
The solution to fixing Twitter’s reliability and still allow developers to support its users is simple: Google should buy Twitter.
Why Google? No other company has the capacity to server up millions of people. Even the mighty Microsoft quickly ran out of bandwidth or server capacity to accommodate all the people interested in downloading released the Windows 7 Beta. Only Google can serve the masses reliably.
I like Twitter. I’d like to see some new features such as group messaging. I don’t want to see developers throttled. Unfortunately, Twitter cannot fix this problem themselves. They need Google.
