For the last several days some of my clients have been reporting they were having problems with their Telstra Bigpond email. They could receive but not send emails.

Most of them had contacted Bigpond before coming to see me, and had been told that the problem was in some way their fault. Incorrect email server name settings, anti-virus software interfering with email, etc.

This was not the case. The problem was with Bigpond’s mail servers.
 
I know there may be delays in recognising that a problem exists. But even making this allowance, Bigpond has known for some days that a large number of their customers were affected by an issue that would cause confusion, and in some cases, disruption to business.
 
Yet they have done nothing to advise their customers of this.
 
It would be a simple matter to send an email to all Bigpond customers saying something like: Some Bigpond customers are currently experiencing difficulties sending emails. We are working on this issue, and will advise you as soon as it is resolved.

Or alternatively: If you are affected by this issue, please take these steps to resolve it…
 
If I treated my customers (I run an IT shop) the way Bigpond treats theirs, I would be out of business in a week.

Incidentally, a Bigpond customer service agent ( some of them must laugh themselves silly when they use that term) has just advised me that the problem is now resolved. Clients who still have difficulties sending email should turn their modem off and then on again. This should resolve the problem.

Perhaps.

Residents report rorting by rascals ringing randomly.

Rancid rogues wrongly represent themselves as reps of reliable retailers.

These reprehensible rapscallions rip off retirees with relish.

Refuse rotten requests to ransack your RAM.

Ring off rapidly!

Kosher companies do not cold call clients for computer consultations.

Compliance with callous con-men may lead to credit card cancellation.

Help from hackers may lead to hijacked hardware.

Cut off cold calling quacks quickly!

In other words:

Neither Microsoft nor any other reputable computer security company cold calls users about virus infections on their computers, problems with their operating system, or anything else.

If someone calls you claiming to be from Microsoft Security, Global Internet Security, or any other tech supplier or tech support company, the caller is trying to scam you.

He may get you bring up the event log as proof of problems which urgently need to be fixed. The computer I am typing on lists 208 ‘problems’ for the last week. It is working perfectly. Problems listed in the event log are not a problem unless your computer is not doing what it should, when the event log may be a useful diagnostic tool for a technician.

Getting people to look at the event log is a good way of scaring old ladies, however.

Once you have checked the event log and are sufficiently alarmed, the scammer will either try to get you give him your credit card details to pay a fee for fixing these imaginary problems, or will give ask you to follow instructions which will give him control over your computer. This will allow him to plant malicious software which may track your key entries, giving him your ID and any passwords you use, or may pop up fake virus or system warnings later in order to get you to pay more money to deal with these further fake problems.

If you get a scam computer tech support call like this, just hang up.

The Clem 7 tunnel would never have been built if actual costs and usage had been known beforehand.

RiverCity is carrying $1.3 billion in debt and wrote down its $1.56 billion of assets to $258 million at June 30 last year.

What the heck were they thinking?

At least it only cost taxpayers and private investors about $3 billion.

The NBN is even more overpriced and unnecessary. $40 billion – $6000 for every household in Australia whether they want it or not - when existing and wireless technologies can provide similar speeds at a fraction of the cost with no public investment?

What the heck are they thinking?

The only internet infastructure sector that genuinely needs taxpayer money is rural and remote Australia, where an investment of about $3 billion into satellite and wireless technologies would provide speeds comparable with those currently available to city users.

Everyone will pay for that through increased taxes, whether they use it or not. And that’s assuming (ha, ha, ha) that costs do not increase.

According to some experts, the planned $43 billion may end up being $8o billion, which brings the cost up to about $12,000 per household.

But even this is not the total price. I had overlooked the cost – anywhere between $750 and $3000 - of getting access points installed in the home.

So the total cost of the NBN could be anywhere up to $15,000 per household. And that’s before any monthly fees.

This is madness. $15,000 for an internet connection? 

No wonder the Labor party doesn’t want a business plan prepared.

How many dams, power stations, hospitals could be built with that money?

Madness.

PS

Stephen Conroy dismissed a prediction that as few as 16% of homes in Tasmania would take advantage of the NBN.

The take-up rate in Tasmania is effectively zero. So far a total of 70 homes connected.

iiNet CEO Michael Malone:

“A total of 70 customers have been signed up in Tasmania under the three brands – so that’s not 70 each but a total of 70 between iiNet, Internode and Primus,” he said. “Demand from our point of view is zero.”

“We’re not getting people calling us up to sign up.  We’ve got the customers that we have on there by calling them.  We’re identifying customers that are on our footprint, looking at those who’ll be better off with NBN products, so where they are going to get a higher speed at the same or more quota for the same price… we haven’t had any cases of people calling us up saying ‘I need to move across now; what do I have to do?’ It’s actually been driven by us.”

Google has long removed sensitive search results from its Chinese search engine at Google.cn, but said Tuesday it plans to end the censorship and may ultimately shut down the company’s China offices.

However, China is highly unlikely to allow Google to run an uncensored version of the search engine, according to observers.

Google has in fact said plainly it will not operate in China under present censorship rules. This follows attempts by hackers to access gmail accounts belonging to known human rights activists.

If Google refuses to filter results and supply information as requested by the Chinese government, China is likely to block access to Google within its borders.

This will cost Google money, enough to hurt, even if not a major percentage of its $22 billion in annual revenues.

Let’s hope Google sticks to its motto ‘Don’t be evil’.

And don’t co-operate with evil either, no matter how much money is involved.

I frequently have clients who want disk partitions copied, extended, etc.

I have used Paragon software before with good results. Or at least, without major disasters.

I recently upgraded to the latest version of Paragon Hard Disk Manager. The disasters began immediately.

Moving partitions is always risky. I always save or image user data before any partition operations. About one out every four times the operation will fail, because of file errors, or a full moon, or the day of the week having a ‘y’ in it, or whatever. It is never a problem, because I always make a complete back up of target disks beforehand.

The first time I used the new Paragon Hard Disk Manager the operation failed. No problem, I thought. A minor inconvenience at most.

Until I tried to restart my computer. I got a message saying there were interrupted operations, and I should insert my recovery CD.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager had no business making any changes to my C: drive at all – that was not one of the drives I was operating on – let alone making changes to critical boot files or records.

No recovery CD would let me restart Windows, nor could the repair utility on the Windows CD get the system working.

Now I had a problem, because the user’s data was no longer accessible from his drive, and my C: drive, where I had saved his disk image, was also inaccessible.

I recovered my and my user’s data from the disk, reinstalled Windows, and tried again. Same problem – the partition operation failed. Windows would not start. Same error message.

I had just upgraded to Windows 7, and thought perhaps there might be an incompatibility, though there was nothing to suggest this on Paragon’s website.

I wiped the disk, went back to Vista Business, and tried again, ths time with a different partition operation on a different disk. Exactly the same result. The operation failed, and Windows would not restart, even though there was no reason for Partition Manager to have made any changes to my primary drive at all.

This is a dog’s breakfast of a programme. There is no excuse for releasing to market a piece of software that repeatedly causes such disastrous disk and sytem errors.

Until Paragon fix this, anyone who uses Hard Disk Manager is at serious risk, not only of wasting several hours of time, as I did, but of losing any or all information from their hard disks.

I have an automatic backup system that copies a full disk image every week to an external drive. But I would still be in trouble if there was a fire, or my gear was stolen, or (and I have seen this happen) internal and external hard disks were both damaged by a power surge.

Mozy offers 2GB of secure remote storage free to home users, or unlimited storage for $4.95 per month.

You really need cable internet or ADSL2 to make this practical for most users. But if you do, it is worth thinking about.

Disclaimer: I do get a (very small) commission (like $1) if you click on the link above and sign up for a plan. So I hope you will. But mainly I just thought it was interesting.

It is a dangerous update. SP2 updates some 50,000 files. If any one of them is corrupt, your computer may stall on restart.

Prior to running SP2, take the following steps:

1.  Back up your important files and settings.

2.  Go to Accessories in the Start menu, and open Command Prompt. Type in the following: sfc /scannow   then press enter.

There is a space between the c and the forward slash. This command will check the integrity of your Windows system files. Have your Vista install disk handy – you will need it if any of your files have to be repaired.

Once this is done, restart your computer, disable your antivirus software, and download and install SP2.

It should now run smoothly. The file update on restart takes some time, so be patient.

If you install SP2 and the computer stalls when it restarts, you will see a message consisting of a numerical code and a filename. The filename tells you the name of the file which is preventing the update from continuing.

If this happens, note the filename. Start the computer into DOS mode (you may need to boot to your Vista install disk, choose “Repair Your Computer’ then choose ‘Command Prompt’). Find the corrupt file (try windows/system32 first, unless you know where the file is). Change the file extension to .old.

For example, if the offending file is trouble.dll, you would type: ren trouble.dll trouble.old   and press enter.

Then restart the computer. Repeat this process till you work through any other corrupt system files.

Windows should then start normally.

You should not have this problem if you run sfc /scannow before installing the update.

Good luck!

Bing’s webmaster tools report they had trouble finding my sitemap last time they crawled the site. I’ve checked that and pinged Bing with the sitemap address. But Qohel is not showing as blocked, and surely a missing sitemap could not cause an already listed site to disappear completely?

I’m confused.

Usually they fail because they do not return relevant usable results. Returning sites clearly related to the search terms entered has been Google’s greatest strength.

Yahoo was for too long compromised by the fact that you had to pay to be listed. That was fine for Yahoo, but meant that many sites useful to searchers could not be found.

That changed, but by the time it did, Google had already established a lead that was too hard to make up.

Another thing Google did well was to make a clear distinction between organic search results and paid search results. Again, this helped users/searchers, so they kept coming back.

But there have been two new entries over the last month which are worth considering.

The first is Wolfram Alpha.

This is not a general search engine. It returns information, not links. But what it does, it does very well. It’s never heard of me, but generally, if you need factual information, or information which can be calculated, Wolfram Alpha is a good place to start. It also has a sense of humour.

The other major newcomer is Microsoft’s Bing.

Microsoft Live Search was always hopeless. I don’t know why, but it just never seemed to return results which were useful.

Bing does a much better job. It is quick to load, pleasant to look at, and clean – that is, the screen is not jumbled up with a whole lot of  useless junk about the latest nude pics of Britney Spears, or why the world is falling apart because of misbehaviour by Australian footballers.

Most importantly, Bing returns relevant and useful results.

My impression is that Google gives more weight to blogs (John Ray agrees), or certainly that Google visits frequently updated sites more often. Perhaps this is because there doesn’t (yet) seem to be any way to send a blog ping to bing. There is a form you can use to submit your site to Bing if it does not appear in their results, and this form might also work as a ping, though I am just guessing about that.

From my brief experiments, it also seems to me that Google gives more weight to incoming links than Bing, while Bing gives more weight to page content. Both methods are reasonable. Google’s will return longer standing, popular results. Bing’s will return sites where the content matches the search terms more closely.

I like Bing. It seems to return more results that relate closely to what I was looking for.

However, for now, Google will stay as my home page.

I couldn’t get maps on Bing to work. But my major reason for staying with Google is that I search for news more than anything else. When you hit the ‘news’ button on Google without entering any search terms, it returns a wide variety of news stories from a wide variety of sources, in a well organised way. Bing returns nothing. This is a major shortcoming, one I hope will be fixed soon.

Results for search term ‘leading conservative blog’ (without quote marks).

Google:  Qohel is first page, third place.

Yahoo:  Qohel is first page, first place.

Bing:   Qohel is first page, first place.

We recorded a payment request from “HostGator -www.hostgator.com- Reseller Web Hosting” to enable the charge of $74.95 on your account.

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If you didn’t make this payment and would like to decline the $74.95 billing to your card, please follow the link below to cancel the payment :

Cancel this payment (transaction id #POS PAYM7284)  (Warning – this is a phishing site – this warning was not in the email, obviously!)

NOTE: Because email is not a secure form of communication, please do not reply to this email.

The link takes you to a very plausible looking pretend Commonwealth Bank website, where you are invited to log in so you can cancel the unauthorised transaction. Once you log in, the owner of the fake site has your internet banking username and password, and can access all your online bank accounts.

Even if you think an email may be genuine, never follow links in emails to your banking website (or to PayPal, Amazon, or any other site where you have a password protected account).

Always open a new browser window, go to the official bank web site, and log in from there.

Some of these are very unpleasant. They can cripple your anti-virus software, replicate in various places on your hard drive, disable Windows updates, disable internet access, and delete or modify key Windows system files to the point where your computer becomes so unstable it cannot be used, or will not start at all.

According to viruslist.com, four of the top twenty malicious programmes infecting personal computers in April were members of the virut family. Nimda, a worm which disables your Windows desktop, is also high on the list.

I have also seen donwadup (conficker) infections, and script downloaders (also known as drive-by downloaders) which can infect your computer when you visit a malicious or infected website.

Some of these infections are extremely difficult to remove, because they make hidden copies of themselves. If even one is missed, the computer will be re-infected. Also, they can infect needed Windows system files in ways that cannot be disinfected without destroying the Windows files, so you can end with a clean computer , but a computer that will not start.

Once you are infected by one virus, the chances are that your computer security will be weakened and your computer will quickly have multiple infections.

Prevention

Use a good anti-virus/anti-spyware programme. For ordinary home use, the free versions of AVG or Avira are quite adequate. If you visit porn or gambling sites, or use p2p (file sharing) software, you will need a high end commercial anti-virus like Kaspersky or Vipre.

Keep your anti-virus software up to date. I have just fixed a computer infected with virut ce. This version of virut was only found in the wild for the first time in February. The computer had a good anti-virus programme, but it had not been updated since early February, so the computer had no protection against viruses developed since then.

Keep Windows up to date by allowing Windows Update to run automatically. Computers running automatic updates were at no risk from conficker.

No anti-virus software can protect your computer all the time, from every attack. The highest rated anti-virus products achieve detection rates of up to 97%.

You can still be safe on the internet if you are cautious.

Do not open files or run programmes if you do not know what they are or where they have come from. This includes email attachments. Take care with files from friends, school, and even commercial suppliers. Infections can come from CDs and flash drives as well as the internet.

Do not use p2p software. Or if you must, run a full virus scan after every download. Do not visit porn or gambling sites. Some people will anyway. If you do, make sure your antivirus is up to date beforehand, and run a full scan after you leave the site.

Run a full, deep or maximum security scan every week.

Do not, ever, respond to a pop-up on your screen telling you your computer is infected, and that you need to download or install an anti-virus product. Clicking anywhere on one of those pop-up boxes, including the ‘’No’ button, may give permission to install rogue anti-virus software which will cost you money, slow down your computer, cause lots of dire (but incorrect) warnings and achieve nothing.

Some fake security alerts are very convincing:

Fake Windows Security Alert

More fake alert pictures from Enigma Software.

Do not be fooled! Don’t click anywhere on such an alert. Shut your computer down, restart, and run a full virus scan.

If you are in doubt about whether your computer may be infected, and you still have internet access, visit and run Microsoft’s Onecare Live safety scanner.