A Christian Viewpoint

I’ve gotten calls from people in the past saying they are from windows tech support. I just got a call today from someone saying that again. Please, Microsoft does not make calls to their customer base. You call them, not the other way around.

Who is calling then? Sounded to me that the person was calling from India. When I challenged him as to who he was he became very offended. Microsoft would fire an employee who treats customers disrespectfully. The gentlemen (?) went on a rant to defend his honour and at the end of his tirade swore at me and hung up.

That was a pretty blatant attack. Perhaps the man was duped into making these calls. Perhaps he himself is a victim. Perhaps.

The point of writing this is to warn you that the scammers are out and trying to get you to open a remote desktop session. Once that occurs you have just given the person, at the other end of the phone, total control over your computer. Don’t do it. They may try other scams on you. Be wary of any cold calls supposedly coming from Microsoft, Windows, etc… It’s not them.

Just a short note to my readers. I received an email this morning supposedly from PayPal saying that my account has received an unusual amount of charges. It gives this reference number: 558-106-219. They ask you to open an enclosed file to verify you are the account holder. Of course… the attachment has a virus embedded. Don’t know what it will do, don’t care, just deleting the email.

The email has in its title:

“Account Review Team.”

If you get a similar email it would be wise just to delete the email.

Most of you would be smart enough to know not to open such an email. This blog entry is aimed at those who are newbies to the net. Hmmm… are there any newbies left out there?

AVG 11’s Search_Shield -> bug for authors

I recently wrote to my webhost provider about a problem I found concerning AVG’s Search_Shield application. I decided to post it here as well. Some people who have Search_Sheild activated in their web-browsers have been reporting that their computer has slowed down, from a little bit to a lot. That is a related issue. The bug I found concerns those who are creating web page content and uploading it to the net. It may also affect a broad number of web host providers. Below is what I found.

To Netfirms Support:

I thought you may like to be informed about a bug I discovered about what happens when a customer that has AVG search-shield installed and enabled on their browser.

I have loaded several pages up to my site, both through ws_ftp and your upload file program, and discovered that when I did so an additional script was uploaded everytime on the page. It is a part of avg 11’s search-shield.

When I go to any site with search-shield activitated on my browser it automatically inserts this script and does a search of avg’s database to see if the site is safe before the browser takes me there. Unfortunately this may increase the bandwidth load a bit. It is enhanced web security with a minor slowdown of broswer connection. I don’t believe that this would impact your company’s bandwidth capabilities.

However…

When I upload a page it contains this script in or near the header. Someone else comming to my site will automaticaaly download this script and may cause a delay in the download. This could slow down their viewing pleasure. It may also cause some bandwidth slowdown on your end. It has on occassion giving me warnings when I view my site. All users of your company who have avg 11 running on their browsers may have this problem. They won’t know they have this problem unless they view their code only through an editor with avg search_shield turned off.

The only way I had to fix this problem of uploading the script was to turn off search-shield before I use any form of ftp. The page will then upload without the script, leaving my html clean. This ftp problem is only for your customers who will have avg 11 with search-shield activated.

This is the script that will upload everytime with search_shield activated:

script
src=”/A2EB891D63C8/avg_ls_dom.js” type=”text/javascript”
/script

I left the brackets <> off so that you could see the script

You may want to make this bug known to your users so that they don’t inadvertently change their html when uploading a page or when editing a page through file manager.

I wish you had something in your knowledge base about this. It could have saved me a lot of time trying to solve the problem. But the problem is new.

Check it out. Hope it helps.

Pushy Sales – The Bane of Manners

Nobody likes a salesman who keeps pushing their products long after the potential customer has decided to leave. Don’t get me wrong, the salesman is trained on how to close the deal. In some senses it is even an art form. Those who are really good at it can manipulate the socks off of a dead man’s feet. My gosh, the very best can do that even to the living. Fortunately most salesman are not that good. Most of us can keep our money in our own pockets.

Then we come to the Internet, a sales pitch in a can, which has absolutely no entertainment value. Oh I’m not talking about the content of the page. That can be very slick. It can be entertaining. It might even be educational. What I don’t like, is when you decide to leave the page, you get the unending pop-up windows. Today I received a visit to my Webpress blog page. I was left a comment by someone named Angelina about how she considered my blog site was ranking too low on the Google search engine. She then offered me a link that would help me with my site, to raise it to the stars of heaven, so that all may see my blog and come and visit me. What the heck, I clicked the link and went for a visit.

I entered gates of the site called SEOPresser. So that you understand SEO is short for search engine optimization. It is either a program or a person who can look at your website or blog page and make suggestions on how to change the content of your site so that search engines will read it, give better emphasis to your words, and place you higher in the search results. Something like that can be useful if you’re trying to sell something over the Internet. However it gets in the way when you’re content is educational. If you want to share your heart and/or what’s on your mind SEO’s get in the way of good form. On the other hand, if you want to sell your heart and/or what’s on your mind, SEO’s are a potential way to go. If ranking and not content is what you’re after you can learn how to change your site and get better results.

All this is a given. Whether you want to share what’s on your heart and/or mind, or whether you want to sell something, I have no problem with that. But the SEOPresser page on the Internet does not want you to leave their site unless you purchase their product. When you decide to leave and click on the link to go elsewhere the Presser site will use a pop-up window to stop you from leaving. If you reject that pop-up window it will pop up another one. Still want to leave? It will pop up another. This is extremely annoying. It is a breach of good manners on the Internet. It is the main reason for creation of pop-up blockers. Now pop-ups can be fine. They can have their uses. But when it is used to get in your face and keep you from leaving it is like being imprisoned. No one likes to be jailed.

In the pursuit of money good manners are too often left at the curb, to be picked up by a garbage truck, and hauled off to the dump for burial. It is done by pushy salespeople who don’t have the grace to quit. They are the bane of good manners and their weapon of choice are pop-up windows. I thought content creators finally stopped using the stupid process. It seems however that some people will not let a bad idea die.

Well, so much for the rant of the day. Enjoy what’s left of it.

For those of you that do not have a virus checker on your computer I thought I would give you a heads up. I received an email from DHL (the delivery service) that stated that the package in route to me has been delayed. The email contains an attachment with additional information. That information contains the virus. Do not open the email of course.

Header reads

from: DHL notification system
subject: DHL notification

AVG, my virus checker, caught this virus this morning.

Did I expect a package? No, but then I am not the only one who orders something on this computer. Once or twice a year my AVG catches a virus. Thankfully that saves a lot of potential grief. Somedays we click without thinking. For those moments I am glad I have a checker.