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Godfather of Spam Jailed for Stock Scam

Tim Sullivan — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:25:16 +0000

A Detroit judge passed sentencing convicting “Godfather of Spam” Alan Ralsky of multiple prison-worthy crimes.

John Leyden from The Register reports: “Notorious spammer Alan Ralsky has been jailed for more than four years over his role in a masterminding a stock fraud spam campaign that made him an estimated $2.7m.

Ralsky, 64, from West Bloomfield, near Detroit, Michigan, was sentenced to 51 months while his son-in-law, Scott Bradley, 48, was imprisoned for 40 months over the same pump and dump stock fraud conspiracy involving thinly-traded stocks.”

Each man plead guilty to the CAN-SPAM Act, wire fraud, and money laundering. They were sentenced on Monday. Five other co-conspirators will face sentencing hearings today.

The conspirators used a botnet in their “pump and dump” stock fraud. They purchased thinly traded equities at rock bottom prices. Next they spammed unsuspecting “investment” victims about potential huge returns these stocks would provide. Once the stock price spiked the conspirators would dump their cheap stocks at greatly inflated prices to the “investment” victims.

“With today’s sentence of the self-proclaimed ‘Godfather of Spam,’ Alan Ralsky, and three others who played central roles in a complicated stock spam pump and dump scheme, the Court has made it clear that advancing fraud through abuse of the Internet will lead to several years in prison,” said US Attorney Terrence Berg for the Eastern District of Michigan.

Ralsky has a history of other spam frauds that have been documented by Spamhaus.

Mailprotector’s service helps to mitigate email threats perpetrated by fraudsters and other evil-doers. Mailprotector prevents spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware from reaching your Exchange server, or any mail server, and flooding your users inbox with junk mail. Try us free for 30 days.

Holiday Gift Ideas

Tim Sullivan — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:06:49 +0000

The Christmas tunes on the radio remind me that Christmas is quickly approaching. Hurry, only 32 shopping days left!

If you’re wondering what to get your favorite IT security practitioner this holiday season then let me suggest the Bruce Schneier action figure. This guy is the GI Joe of the crypto and IT security world. I’m not sure if his action figure comes with a kung fu grip, though.

About Mailprotector
Mailprotector is the GI Joe of the email security world. Our services protect your Exchange server, or any mail server, from: spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware. Get Mailprotector’s “kung fu grip” to protect your inbox today! We’ll even gift wrap for free .

A Smartphone and Hooters?

David Setzer — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:27:53 +0000

Today’s thoughts are a follow-up to two previous posts.

Regarding OS discrepancies

First, a couple of readers questioned my comparisons on my iPhone 3Gs vs. BlackBerry Bold vs. Windows Mobile showdown because they thought I should be using the Windows Mobile touch screen version (not the smartphone version). All I can say is that I compared the most popular devices with whatever OS they came loaded with. I have used the touchscreen version – an iPaq in 2005 with Quad band GSM, Bluetooth and WiFi. I have to say that I liked the overall usage, but I had to buy the voice recognition for $30 extra and the unit was a bit of a brick. I need a device that will slide into a pants or jacket pocket and ride around unnoticed.

Marketing madness

Secondly, some of you may remember my musings on the marketing offers of our local banks and whether offering a free 2-liter of coke or box of cookies would really do much to drive hordes of new customers through the doors. Well, sad to say, I have another one.

This one falls straight into the “WHAT were they thinking” category. I’m riding in to the office this morning and hear a radio ad talking about a restaurant in a nearby city that had re-opened. They go on to say “Come on by, and don’t forget that kids eat FREE all day Saturday with the purchase of any adult meal here at…” are you ready for this?… “Hooters.” REALLY!!! Hooters!! Kids eat Free!! Wow, let me gather up my middle school son, my daughters and wife and lets head on over to Hooters on Saturday.

I guess it gives me hope that if all of my business pursuits completely fell apart, I could always get a job in marketing.

Speechless….

iPhone 3Gs vs. Blackberry Bold vs. Windows Mobile (Blackjack) – Part 5: And the Winner IS!

David Setzer — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:26:22 +0000

We’ve now looked at our devices in the 3 major functional categories, but what about all the other little applications out there? What about the things we want our ‘phones’ to do that we don’t even know about yet. This is where we have to consider how well our device functions as an overall platform that can be extended and built out.

Today’s hands down winner in the Platform category is:
iPhone

Honestly, I don’t even need to dissect the differences here. One word says it all “App Store”. After less than a month I use my iPhone to track my run times distance and routes, listen to Pandora, update Facebook, ping a server, buy movie tickets, make Skype calls, match paint colors, etc, etc, etc. Apple made a brilliant move by opening up the platform for 3rd party development and sale through the iTunes app store. ’nuff said.

So where does this leave us in an overall analysis?

In my opinion the iPhone is the clear and convincing winner.

iPhone
From what I understand of the first 2 generations of iPhone, I probably wouldn’t have liked it, but the speed, storage capacity (mine’s a 32G), GPS and voice dialing of the 3Gs make it the complete package. I can’t imagine using anything else. (I must admit though, that my first unit crashed and had to be replaced. If anyone from AT&T is reading this, please tell your customer support that you shouldn’t be charging me a 10% restocking fee on an exchange of a bad unit! But, that’s AT&T – a totally different review.)

My final confirmation of iPhone’s magic was in an anniversary gift to my wife last month. When I gave it to her she told me to take it back…she didn’t want it. She’s not a techie and just wants basic functionality because she will NEVER read a manual or user guide. Two weeks later I couldn’t pry it out of her hands. She’s texting, staying up with friends on Facebook, paying bills and taking pictures and videos of the kids. She’s thoroughly enjoying the benefits the phone has brought to her life and she’s never read a single instruction. In fact, it could ALMOST replace a computer for her. She just started using it and she now does over half of what she used to do on her computer on the iPhone.

Blackjack I (Windows Mobile)
My daughter has my Blackjack I and loves it. She uses it to make calls, check email and (of course) for texting. If you’re looking for a basic phone with some PIM capability and over the air syncing this is probably your best bet.

Blackberry Bold
As far as Blackberry goes, I honestly have to say that you would have to pay me to use it…a lot. It has an awesome keyboard but that was pretty much it. I was thoroughly disappointed and have no idea what the crackberry addicts see in these.

In the end, these are all just my opinions and observations. Yours may be totally different. That’s why our Hosted Exchange 2007 service supports all three devices. To each his own.

iPhone 3Gs vs. Blackberry Bold vs. Windows Mobile (Blackjack) – Part 4: Make Me Smile!

David Setzer — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:21:57 +0000

Ok, now that we have the serious productivity issues out of the way lets look at how these devices stack up against each other in the area of entertainment.

Today’s winner is…
iPhone (did we really even think it would be close?)

Here’s the Lowdown

Blackjack I (Windows Mobile)
First, let’s look at Windows Mobile. I tried to use Cingular/AT&T’s video service to no avail and even loaded some MP3’s on my phone before an international trip. The videos were just too small and I was forced to use Samsung’s headphones because they didn’t have a standard headphone jack. The internal memory was too small, so I added a 1GB micro SD card which gave me some more music, but I generally didn’t have time to decide on which music I should take on a trip. I found myself always trying to guess what mood I’ll be in and I hated that. After one or two attempts I finally just gave up trying to use it as a music player.

The Blackjack’s camera had a delay that was so bad that it is virtually non-functional. I rarely took pictures.

iPhone
The iPhone is, of course, at it’s heart and iPod which beautifully syncs with iTunes. The only reason I started using iTunes to begin with was that a friend bought the red U2 iPod because he liked red and didn’t really care about the $50 credit for U2’s box set (which I gladly accepted and used). I’ve had a couple Nanos, but they’ve never been big enough to hold my whole catalog.

I am an ardent opponent of today’s DRM. While I wholeheartedly support a content owner’s right to profit from their work I also believe in the licensee’s Fair Use rights. I was very pleased to see Apple start offering DRM free downloads like Amazon and will be abandoning any last vestige of non iTunes based players on my systems. I love that my 32GB 3Gs can hold my whole catalog of music AND podcasts, so I always have whatever I want with me. No more carrying a separate player. I’ve even started using one of those old cassette adapters to play it in the car even though it’s hard to take a call and listen to music.

The iPhones focus selection camera along with editable video and Facebook app is great. I’m taking all kinds of web quality pictures and video of the kids and my trips. When you don’t want to carry a higher quality still or video camera the iPhone is a nice substitute.

With it’s iPod heart and App Store games this one was really a no brainer. Music…movies…TV…Autofocus Camera.

BlackBerry
The only thing I can say about the BlackBerry is that it had a Texas Hold ‘Em poker game that I liked and a nice flash on the camera. Does it play music? I don’t think it’s supposed to entertain.

While communication and productivity are definitely top concerns. Entertainment capabilities and device consolidation are making this category more important.

Stay tuned for tomorrows final installment when we look at the overall platform and extendibility of each device.

3 Ways Windows 7 Will Enable You to Work Faster

Jeremy Nigh — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:02:19 +0000

Windows 7 has been given a firm release date of October 22nd 2009. This is welcome news for a growing number of users (myself included) who are becoming more fed up by Vista’s countless time-wasting shenanigans on a daily basis. In anticipation of the final product release I’ve been looking over some of the benefits that Windows 7 will offer, and in this post I’d like to highlight the top 3 speed-enhancing features that I’m looking forward to.

3. Faster Startup
Every morning I walk into work, push the power button on my PC, wait 20 seconds or so, enter my username and password, and proceed to hit the office dining area to snag a cup of coffee (that’s not as good as what I just drank at home). I don’t perform this daily ritual because I just can’t get enough of the Folgers, but simply because Vista routinely takes anywhere between 3-5 minutes to connect to the network, load my essential programs, and get itself awake and firing on all cylinders. Windows 7 is a good bit faster. The preview release boots about 20% faster, and some expect the boot up time to be even more efficient when Windows 7 hits the shelves this fall. This may seem like a marginal improvement, but I’m used to Vista’s turtle-like pace so I’ll take any speed improvements I can get.

2. Snappy Dual Window Comparison
I work on the web development team for the email security company, Mailprotector. Frequently I find myself optimizing websites for cross-browser compatibility, and in the past it’s always been a pain to drag window handles to the right size in order to show two windows on one screen with each taking up 50% width and 100% height. It seems like an awful lot of work for something that should be simple, and thankfully Microsoft agrees.

With Windows 7 arranging two windows in this type of configuration is a snap… quite literally. All you have to do is drag one window until it hits the right side, drag the other window to the left side, and watch in awe as they snap beautifully into place with 100% height and 50% width exactly how they should. No more messing around with cumbersome drag handles.

1. The Jumplist
Vista’s taskbar is little more than XP’s taskbar with a minor facelift. Sure the thumbnail that appears on mouseover when Aero is enabled is neat (albeit uselessly small and really it’s nothing more than eyecandy), but the actions you can take on tabs for running programs themselves are pretty much exactly like they were in XP. Such is not the case with Windows 7. Enter the “Jumplist”.

With the Jumplist you can right-click a program in the taskbar and instantly see a list recently taken actions and recently viewed files associated with that program.

The Jumplist lets you quickly view recently (or frequently) taken actions or recently opened files for each program that’s pinned to the taskbar. Now THIS is handy.

In most programs I use on a daily basis, this will eliminate some hassle for me. For instance, when using Photoshop, I generally have to open the program and go to File\Open Recent>recentfile.psd to open something that I’ve been recently working on. With the Jumplist all you need to do is right-click a program in the taskbar (running or not) and a list of files you’ve been working on will show above the icon. From there just click the file or action you want to use and you’re good to go. It’s not going to save you hours of time, but it’s a solid and sensible feature that will allow you to jump around between files more quickly.

Overall I’m really stoked about the new features that Windows 7 is bringing to PC users. I think it’s clear to see that Microsoft seems to be getting it right this time out as Windows 7 is proving to be sleek, fast, and powerful. I eagerly anticipate the day when I can take Vista off life-support and reformat my system with an OS that was thoughtfully designed around the concept of improving user experience and task efficiency. October can’t come soon enough.

Microsoft opens up Bing.com, early

Ben Hathaway — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:33:54 +0000

Now this is something you don’t see very often, a software company rolling out a product ahead of schedule. Microsoft was scheduled to release Bing.com, its new search engine, on Wednesday, June 3rd but instead released it today, two days ahead of schedule. And more importantly, the roll out seems to have gone very smooth. I have used it multiple times today and the site and results are very fast. Usually a launch like this generates so much extra traffic that the servers end up overloaded an you end up having trouble trying out the new site (see Wolfram Alpha launch a few weeks ago).

Bing’s interface and search results looks promising as well. I’ve been trying to use it for all of my searching today and the results have been good for a wide variety of searches. And while this is probably not a Google killer, it definitely has more potential than any of Google’s other competitors.

One of the unique features of Bing that I like is the ability to hover over a line with an orange dot that appears to the right side of the listing your mouse is over and get more text for the description of the listing. Sometimes it seems that the couple lines of text you typically get in the description just isn’t enough and this addresses that.

If you want to try it out and see what a Bing search results page look like, give this search a try.

Microsoft Security Essentials Pack now in beta, to use the cloud