Author: Rick

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Russian Gang Hijacking PCs

This NY Times article talks about how a gang in a Russian town is using Microsoft administrative tools to infect private and government computers. A few excerpts:

The gang was identified publicly in May by Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, a computer security firm in Atlanta. Mr. Stewart, who has determined that the gang is based in Russia, was able to locate a central program controlling as many as 100,000 infected computers across the Internet.

The system infects PCs with a program known as Coreflood that records keystrokes and steals other information.

“The great thing about this system is that from one computer it is possible to push out updates to all machines in a corporate network at once,” Mr. Stewart said. “This is a useful tool that Microsoft has provided. However, the bad guys said, ‘We’ll just use it to roll out our Trojan to every machine in the network.’ ”

The gang then uses the passwords to access your bank account and transfer out money. Scary stuff.

This only affects Microsoft operating systems, so Macs are safe. In order to protect PCs, I suggest using:

  • hardware firewall (included in routers)
  • Windows Vista or XP with Service Pack 3 (latest)
  • Anti-virus software such as AVG Free or Avast.

If you get infected by something like this Coreflood virus, you should do a complete re-install of your system.

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Add RAM for better performance

Adding RAM to a computer can be a cheap and easy way to improve performance.

RAM (Random Access Memory) is the active memory that your computer uses to think about what it is doing. The memory is lost when your computer shuts down. If you don’t have enough memory, the computer will have to also use a swap file on your hard drive which is slower.

Modern computers typically benefit from at least 1GB of RAM. Windows Vista 32-bit version will recognize up to 3.5GB of RAM, while Vista 64-bit and Mac OS X will support virtually as much RAM as you can afford. Adding RAM will especially help if you are running several programs at once or if you are working with large files such as photos and videos.

Recent Install

I just got a Virginia client this Acer laptop from NewEgg on special for $400. The CPU is a decent dual-core, so the real bottleneck on this system is the included 1GB of RAM. Windows Vista needs more RAM than XP. Additional RAM also helps because this laptop shares its RAM for use with the video card. This replacement 2 GB RAM from NewEgg only cost $38. That gives this laptop a noticeable speed boost, making the whole purchase just $455 (with shipping) for an awesome laptop.

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SyncBack Backup Software for Windows

Data backups should be done regularly and automatically. SyncBack for Windows does that.

Look for the version SyncBack Freeware V3.2.18.0, which provides everything you should need for free. It can backup to an attached drive, a network drive, or to a remote server via FTP. By backing up to a remote server, you have the added benefit of protecting your data against your local computer system being stolen or destroyed.

SyncBack can be scheduled to run in the background. There are lots of options for backup and directory synronization. SyncBack can even email you if there is a problem.

Be Proactive

People call Tech DC to help after they have lost their data. Often this is because they had a hard drive failure.  We can sometimes recover the data using software such as SpinRite from Steve Gibson. But if you use SyncBack, you can rest easier that you have a backup.

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Murky Coffee incident

Murky Coffee here in Arlington, Virginia, has great coffee and is a relaxing place to work on your laptop with free WiFi.

They were recently a small internet sensation when an angry cusomer was denied espresso over ice. The customer blogged about it.  Boing Boing and the Washington Post picked up on the funny story and Murky Coffee has responded on their site here and then here.  It seems that the customer considered espresso over ice to be a god-given right in a coffee shop. Whatever the case, they make good coffee and are worth visiting.

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We need an eBay competitor

Problems on the Auction Block

eBay is the biggest auction site on the internet. This has generally worked well for people. More sellers provide more products to buyers. More buyers are better for sellers. But eBay has taken unfair advantage of this near market monopoly.

Over the last several years eBay has regularly increased fee percentages. For example, if you are a seller and your item ends at $150, then your ending fees will have increased over 40% in the past years. Most recently the final value fee changed from 5.25% to 8%. eBay has tried to hide this by lowering insertion fees, but the overall fees have increased dramatically. eBay also owns PayPal now and takes a cut from that transaction too. See this Fee Calculator for exact fees.

No greater service has come with these fees. eBay still has rampant fraud. Invariably people will email me as a seller asking me to end my auction early in exchange for their paying me early. It’s a Nigerian Prince type scam.

Buyers are still regularly defrauded by sellers who have built up a good reputation by numerous bogus low-cost auction transactions.

eBay has also made things bad for sellers by not allowing them to leave negative feedback for buyers. That’s right. You can leave feedback, but it has to be positive. I recently sold something on eBay and the buyer just didn’t pay. I can’t leave that person negative feedback. eBay has said that this is so that sellers do not have an unfair advantage. But all this has done provide an unfair advantage to buyers.

Competitor Please

Because of eBay’s arrogant attitude toward its customers, it is time for them to get a real competitor. The nature of an auction is that it needs lots of buyers and sellers to work. So it would be easiest for a big company with existing traffic to offer auctions.

Google is the biggest kid on the block. If they started auctions, eBay would be forced to lower prices. However, eBay is Google’s largest customer for its ads. Google has also been slow in moving into the content business, afraid to scare off its advertisers who might be competing with them. Still, Google could easily compete with eBay.

Yahoo gave up on their rival auction site about a year ago. It was odd that Yahoo search engine didn’t feature their search results over those from eBay. Still, Yahoo has many content sites and could try again to advertise a new auction site on its other websites.

Amazon’s Selling on Amazon could be a strong natural competitor. It sells at a fixed price, but has higher fees than eBay. Amazon also has a payment system that is somewhat of a PayPal competitor, but it costs even more and is difficult to use.

An unknown could also compete. But these sites have to do things like offering fixed-price auctions for fear of not enough bidders.  Etsy is for selling handmade goods. ePier is a small and simple auction site.  Overstock.com also has an auction site.

Someone should step up. There are numerous forums with people complaining about eBay’s fees and behavior. People are getting fed up and are ready for a real alternative.