It includes 6 things that explain why it is a spam. Andrew Ludgate’s first note is that there is a “Click Here” text in the middle of the message. The second note says that there is an “opt-out” banner which indicates it is an ad. Next, there is a unique ID included in the email.

Fourth, the message does not contain any information regarding who sent the email. The URL is the fifth indication. It is a random sub-domain and it ends with .info. Lastly, everything in the email is an image except for the unique ID.

Source: Sophos

This tool is more for the technicians who have the job of looking over a business or school network. However, this could be used to find a single printer on a residential setup.

Page Countster is a small, portable and freeware application designed to scan a network for printers and display the information about them including the IP address, MAC Address, Host Name, Model Name, Serial Number, Total Page Count, Color Page Count and the ink levels.

Some other features that this application has is the ability to send the information to an email address or display it as a HTML report. Another neat feature is that you can right click on the printer and bring up more information including the loading of the printers web interface. You can also send a test page to any network printer without needing a driver.

Note: This application must be “Run as Administrator” as it makes use of RAW sockets. If you don’t, you will get a socket error.
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Today, while I was at a local shopping center with my fiancée I quickly ducked into a computer store to have a look around. While I was there I found this:
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The year 2009 has almost come to an end and it is also Technibble’s 4th year of operation. The site has grown to the point where it had 62% more unique visitors than last year.

I’d like to thank you, the readers, for helping us create a great community for computer technicians. Without your comments, opinions and experience Technibble wouldnt be the place it is now.

Over the last year there have been about 120 non-blog articles and I have compiled a list of some of the most discussed and “must read” articles in case you missed a few:
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The message invites the reader to click on a link which is supposed to be the best video about animals. It also says that the user is subscribed to the “ebooksandmore” group in Google Groups.

The two URLs in the message are not shown fully in the post at Sophos. When a user clicks on the first link, he or she will be shown a webpage and then there would be a pop-up that says the user need the latest version of Flash Plugin to watch a media file.

Source: Sophos

A story was posted at consumerist.com about a laptop that was sent for a repair at Office Depot. The laptop was fixed by the company and it worked for a few months before it broke again.

The problem was about the power port. In the second repair, the company just glued the port back to the system board according to Scott, the man who sent his laptop to Office Depot.

Later on, he found that the glue melted and his finger got a minor burn.

The laptop is an Acer Extensa and Scott mentioned that his next two options, after it was fixed for the third time, is to request a replacement or send it again for a repair.

Source: The Consumerist

Have you ever had to backup a clients files to a CD or DVD? I think most of us have at some point and it can be tedious sorting out how many files will fit on a single disk, especially if the client has a lot of data.

This is where Capacity comes in to make the task of backing up to CD or DVD much easier. Capacity will automatically separate the files into different CD or DVD sized folders. It can even create these CD/DVD sized folders based on the file type if you want so you can keep all documents on one CD and pictures on another. There is also other sorting criteria such as by month created, by month modified and by file size.

Capacity is small and mostly portable (requires .NET 3.5) application with a donation-ware license. This means it is free to use but if you like it you should consider donating to the developer.

This application is definitely worth keeping on your onsite USB drive and the backup machine in your workshop.
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Over 8 million Adobe Flash files are vulnerable to attacks according to a security researcher.

The files are stored on a variety of sites that includes casinos, banks, and sports teams. The bug can let an attacker inject a malicious code and content into a web browser of a visitor. If the attack is successful, the attacker can steal credentials.

These files contain ActionScript code that is poorly written according to the researcher.

Two years ago, 10,000 sites were exposed as vulnerable to attacks as they contain Adobe-based content that has serious vulnerabilities.

Source: The Register

The overhaul of Firefox’s interface has been delayed. Instead of debuting in version 3.7, it is now scheduled to debut in version 4.0 which is a major release slated for a 2010 release.

Mozilla, the developer of Firefox, would “ribbonize” the browser and borrow graphics graphics concepts from Microsoft. This means eliminating the top-of-the-frame menus.

Stephen Horlander of Mozilla said that there will be an “App Button” that will take place of the menus.

The source article includes a screenshot of the new interface.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD

Windows 7’s processor cycles will go through the roof when opening corrupted media files according to an article at Softpedia.

Microsoft explains, “You have some corrupted .wav files in a folder on a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. When you open the folder, you encounter the following problems: The computer responds slowly. You cannot perform any other operations. You experience high CPU usage in the Explorer.exe process.”

Windows Media Player will stop to respond after opening corrupted .wav files and Wmplayer.exe will also generate high CPU usage according to the company.

Source: Softpedia