Archive for November, 2009
BLACKMAGICCOMPUTERS.COM:”Godfather of Spam” goes to prison for four years
by admin on Nov.29, 2009, under Articles
One of the biggest spammers on the ‘Net will spend the next four years inside a federal prison after a judge yesterday sentenced him and the members of his wide-ranging “pump and dump” stock scam.
Alan Ralsky, the so-called “Godfather of spam” was yesterday sentenced by a federal judge in Detroit to spend the next 51 months of his life in prison for wire fraud, mail fraud, and violations of the CAN-SPAM act.
Not content simply to move boxes of pills or to sign people up for new mortgages, Ralsky’s operation instead pulled in millions of dollars through “pump and dump” schemes of thinly traded stocks in companies you’ve never heard of. Millions of e-mails would announce some hot new “Internet IPO!!!!!” just about to drop, and—amazingly—some people would want in on the action. Since the stocks in question were low-volume “pink sheets” stocks, even low levels of activity could boost the stock price, at which point the owners would sell and forward tens of thousands of dollars from Hong Kong to the Standard Federal Bank in Troy, Michigan.
This might not sound like a good way to get rich, but the government’s court documents showed just how lucrative the practice could be. Consider the list of following payments that arrived from Hong Kong in just one month, July 2005:
- July 5: $180,826.61
- July 11: $211,595.76
- July 14: $13,532
- July 22: $780,295.98
- July 26: $65,590.71
- July 27: $424,963.73
- July 27: $23,702
A scheme like this required a certain amount of sophistication, and Ralsky appears to have run it like a real business. He was the chief executive, and his son-in-law, Scott Bradley, was the chief financial officer. John Bown, CEO of network administration company GDC Layer One, was the “chief technology officer and network systems manager” for the spammers. William Neil served as the chief operating officer and registered many of the hundreds of bogus domain names used by the group.
The conspiracy was global. Although Ralsky and Bradley both lived in West Bloomfield, Michigan, members of their team operated from New York, Brazil, California, Hong Kong, and Dayton, Ohio, and included coders, a stockbroker, a Chinese CEO, and network admins.
Ralsky has been at his tricks for years, and eventually acquired a reputation as one of the world’s top spammers. Court documents show that when the spammers recruited someone who claimed he could get 20 million e-mails a day into AOL and Hotmail, the man was awestruck to find out that he was joining Ralsky’s operation. “King of spam wants to rent me,” he wrote in an instant message. “Cool.” (The man eventually made several hundred thousand dollars from his work for Ralsky.)
The Spamhaus description of Ralsky says that “he has grown from a small time operator, under the ‘Additional Benefits’ moniker, to one of the bigger spam houses on the Internet with a gang of fellow morally challenged types working with him to pump out every type of sleazy deal and scam offer into millions of internet users’ mailboxes.”
Ralsky wasn’t always careful. He would recruit coders from sites like “special ham” (spam) using the “amr777″ handle, and his team tried to cloak its e-mail discussions about proxies by using the fairly transparent replacement “p’s,” “peas,” “proximate,” and “p s.”
Ralsky and company earned more than $2.6 million between May 1 and December 1, 2005 alone, but the feds were closing in. A three-year investigation by the FBI, the US Postal Inspection Service, and the Internal Revenue Service (with a little help from the SEC) untangled the conspiracy. In 2007, the government moved to indict the entire conspiracy.
Yesterday, the lead defendants were finally sentenced after pleading guilty in June 2009. Ralsky and his son-in-law got 51 months and 40 months in jail, respectively, and had to forfeit the cash associated with the spamming scheme. They will be on probation after their release. How Wai John Hui, the Chinese/Canadian CEO who helped arrange the stocks for use in the scheme, also got 51 months. John Bown got 32 months for setting up a botnet used to send the e-mails. A handful of others will be sentenced today.
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BLACKMAGICCOMPUTERS.COM:Microsoft targets 2012 for Windows 8
by admin on Nov.29, 2009, under Articles
According to a Microsoft roadmap, Windows 7′s and Windows Server 2008 R2′s successors are slated for somewhere around 2012.
When we first started posting news tidbits regarding Windows 8, we warned readers not to expect the operating system to arrive until 2011 at the earliest, and we noted that 2012 was more likely. After the problems caused by the long gap between the releases of Windows XP and Windows Vista, Microsoft said that starting with Windows 7, the company would work really hard to follow a three-year release cycle. Windows 7 was released on October 22, 2009, so it makes sense that Windows 8 will get here in 2012, assuming no delays. That might be a slightly harder feat to achieve given that Windows 8 will be a major release (like Windows Vista was, as opposed to a minor one, like Windows 7 was) but since Windows 7 arrived less than three years after Vista, Microsoft should be able to pull it off.
The roadmap posted by msftkitchen, therefore, doesn’t really show anything too surprising: the operating system is indeed codenamed Windows 8 (we knew that), it will be a major release (we knew that), and it is currently slated for 2012 (we guessed that). The successor to Windows Server 2008 R2 is also expected to arrive in 2012, but the server roadmap doesn’t give the release a name or even a codename (we were expecting something like Windows 8 Server). Please remember, though, that the tilde in front of the 2012 year is there for a reason: Microsoft isn’t setting anything in stone.
In terms of final names, we’re like to see “Windows 8″ and “Windows Server 2012,” again assuming no major delays and assuming Microsoft is going to stick to the same naming scheme. When Microsoft decided to keep the codename for Windows 7 as the final name of the product in October 2008, we noted that this new naming scheme was likely to remain for future Windows client releases; it would be really confusing, not to mention terribly foolish, to have only one release with a number suffix in its name. As for the Windows server releases, the year suffix signifying a major release and the R2 suffix signifying a minor release seems to be working just fine. We don’t see much reason to change this system, and for the sake of consistency, hopefully Microsoft doesn’t either.
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BLACKMAGICCOMPUTERS.COM:IE6 and IE7 vulnerable to latest flaw; IE8 immune
by admin on Nov.29, 2009, under Articles
Microsoft has confirmed reports of a new vulnerability that affects both Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7, but not Internet Explorer 8.
Microsoft has issued Security Advisory 977981 in regard to public reports of a vulnerability that exists as an invalid pointer reference of Internet Explorer. Under certain conditions, it is possible for a CSS/Style object to be accessed after the object is deleted, and thus, if Internet Explorer attempts to access the supposedly freed object, it can end up running attacker-supplied code. IE6 SP1 on Windows 2000 SP4, as well as IE6 and IE7 on supported editions of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 are affected. Microsoft notes that IE 5.01 SP4 and IE8 on all supported versions of Windows are not affected, but of course IE6 and IE7 still account for over 40 percent of the browser market.
Exploit code for the flaw was first posted late last week on the BugTraq mailing list (see either securityfocus.com or seclists.org). Microsoft noted its concern that this new report of the vulnerability was not responsibly disclosed, potentially putting computer users at risk, but that it is not aware of any attacks that try to use the reported vulnerability against IE6 and IE7. Redmond says it is actively monitoring the situation and may provide a security update on an upcoming Patch Tuesday or an out-of-cycle patch once it is ready. The next Patch Tuesday is scheduled for December 8, 2009, but we’re not likely to see a patch out that soon.
In addition to the latest version being unaffected by this vulnerability, Microsoft offered four other mitigating factors:
- Protected Mode in IE7 on Windows Vista limits the impact of the vulnerability.
- By default, Internet Explorer on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 runs in a restricted mode that is known as Enhanced Security Configuration. This mode sets the security level for the Internet zone to High and so is a mitigating factor for websites that you have not added to the Internet Explorer Trusted sites zone.
- An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less affected than users who operate with administrative user rights.
- By default, all supported versions of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, and Windows Mail open HTML e-mail messages in the Restricted sites zone, which should mitigate attacks trying to exploit this vulnerability by preventing Active Scripting and ActiveX controls from being used when reading HTML e-mail messages. However, if a user clicks a link in an e-mail message, the user could still be vulnerable to exploitation of this vulnerability through the Web-based attack scenario.
Microsoft also offered three workarounds for the new IE flaw. The first one explains how to set the Internet and Local intranet security zone settings to “High” so that the browser prompts the user before running ActiveX Controls and Active Scripting in these zones. The second one details how to configure Internet Explorer to prompt before running Active Scripting or to disable Active Scripting in the Internet and Local intranet security zone. Finally, the last one suggests enabling Data Execution Prevention (DEP) for IE6 SP2 or IE7. All three are explained with step-by-step instructions in the security advisory and can be done by simply changing settings in Internet Explorer.
In December 2008, Microsoft released an out-of-band security update for Internet Explorer and encouraged all users to run Windows Update or Microsoft Update to download the fix.
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BLACKMAGICCOMPUTERS.COM:Now that AMD and Intel have settled, the fight really begins
by admin on Nov.29, 2009, under Articles
Last Friday, AMD and Intel reached a historic settlement that leaves AMD with a fighting chance. Here’s a look at the settlement, and at what AMD faces when its employees clock in on Monday.
This past Friday, Intel and AMD announced a settlement in their acrimonious antitrust dispute, with AMD clearly coming out on top to the tune of $1.25 billion in cash and a host of concessions. Both companies hosted conference calls that Friday morning, and later in the day the released excerpts from the agreement that makes up the non-cash portion of the deal, in which Intel agrees to a number of conditions that should make life much easier for AMD and its fab spinoff, GlobalFoundries.
A hard reset
“With this agreement, we are trying to reset the relationship between AMD and Intel,” said an AMD exec on the conference call. And a hard reset it is, given what Intel has conceded.
The first thing that the two parties have agreed on is that Intel won’t engage in the sorts of anticompetitive practices that were outlined in AMD’s suit and in the NYC Attorney General’s suit of the week before. The lawsuits and Friday’s settlement go into specifics of the different types of proscribed behavior, but they all boil down to accusations of Intel strong-arming OEMs and ODMs into either not using AMD CPUs in their systems, or into severely handicapping their AMD-based products by launching them late or placing hard limits on the number of them that are shipped.
Intel allegedly had a variety of mechanisms for carrying out such strong-arming, some of which we’ve described previously. All of them involved either the granting or withholding of monetary inducements—i.e., giving cash kickbacks (dressed as rebates and other incentives) to OEMs for playing along, or withholding money or technical help to OEMs who flirt with AMD a little too much.
The key point, according to AMD, is that “Intel will not be able to condition doing business with them on not doing business with us.”
To ensure that Intel toes the line and to keep these issues from spilling back over into the courts again, Intel and AMD have set up arbitration and audit mechanisms for checking compliance and resolving future disputes.
On the Friday conference call, Intel executives claimed that they had never done any of this alleged bad behavior to begin with, so it was no problem for them to agree not to do it going forward.
“We continue to believe that we’ve not violated any laws or regulations in these areas,” said an Intel spokesperson. “However, it makes a lot of sense for us to stipulate that we won’t do things that we both agree are wrong… from our side, we won’t do those things, we haven’t done those things, so there’s no difference carrying forward.”
And if it wasn’t clear that Intel plans to brazen it out and insist that it’s agreeing to refrain from activities that it never engaged in anyway, different executives repeated this line with varying levels of intensity throughout the call. In the Q&A, a reporter from the Financial Times asked, “So this involves no changes at all in Intel’s behavior, full stop?” One of the Intel execs replied, “No changes at all.”
Intel is double-plus insistent that the only new thing that this agreement brings to the table are the compliance and arbitration mechanisms, which are, of course, in place to ensure that Intel doesn’t do what it hasn’t been doing, and thus they don’t really mean anything.
But no one should expect Intel to take any other position, because the chipmaker still has antitrust proceedings against it in progress, so any admission of guilt on its part would immediately bring the full force of the law down on it from the quarters where it’s still threatened.
Benchmarks and fabs
There are other components to the agreement besides the alleged inducements, and these are also important to AMD. One of the clauses stipulates that Intel won’t attempt to rig compilers and benchmarks—either Intel’s own or those of a third party—to “artificially impair” AMD’s chips.
Also critical for AMD are the licensing portions of the agreement. AMD’s licensing agreement with Intel had previously forced GlobalFoundries to remain a “subsidiary” of AMD, or else the fab would lose its license to fabricate x86-compatible processors. Under the settlement, however, AMD can now fully and finally spin off GlobalFoundries as a completely separate entity, without having to worry that the new fab will lose AMD as a customer.
It’s a little late, but here’s hoping
The AMD that scored Friday’s victory is, in many ways, a shadow of the AMD of earlier years. A combination of major execution missteps and the economic downturn have contrived to greatly weaken the AMD side of the merged AMD/ATI entity. AMD has cut staff, gutted its R&D budget, thrown its promising Imageon line overboard, and generally behaved like a starving character in a Stephen King novel (eating one’s own limbs and such) in its recent effort to attain the barest sliver of profitability—$35 million in the green this past quarter, AMD’s first profitable quarter in years.
In short, over the course of the past two years, AMD has essentially retreated back into its core businesses—x86 server and desktop CPUs, and GPUs—and is now attempting to rebuild from there. Before Friday’s settlement, their odds were passing slim. But the company that opens its doors Monday has at least a fighting chance, if Bulldozer and Bobcat can deliver the goods in 2011.
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BLACKMAGICCOMPUTERS.COM: Computer Diagnostics 20% off this week! www.Blackmagiccomputers.com
by admin on Nov.24, 2009, under Updated Website Information
This week we are diagnosing computers with a 20% discount in price! Even if you dont live in the area we also can remote into your computer and perform diagnostics and fix software related issues with you computer. For more information please contact us:
(231) 342-7837
BLACKMAGICCOMPUTERS.COM: The Microsoft Ban Wagon Strikes Again!
by admin on Nov.14, 2009, under Articles
Microsoft has finally evened the odds. After so many months of people seemingly getting off ’scott-free’ playing pirated XBOX 360 games online, Microsoft has finally chosen this day to cut them off completely. If you have a modded system, and somehow think this gives you the right to play on XBOX Live among legit users with non-hacked systems and no cheats installed, you might want to think twice before turning on your 360 today. You might just be greeted with this:
Source: Gamerscore Blog (official Xbox 360 blog)
No warnings, no excuses. If a mod is detected, your console is blocked from being able to connect to Xbox Live for good.
Needless to say, a lot of people may be begging their parents for a new console this week. And after that, surely they will never again try to use Xbox Live. At least, until the next mod chip comes out that bypasses this detection. Then comes the next round of bans from Microsoft. Let the cat & mouse games continue!
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BLACKMAGICCOMPUTERS.COM: Gateway Laptop M-1617 Repair
by admin on Nov.12, 2009, under Customer's We Have Serviced
Cusotmer called and stated their Gateway Laptop M-1617 was loading into windows and needed some help in figuring out what was wrong with it.
We received the laptop from the customer and after turning it on we saw that windows appeared to be trying to repair some corrupt files. After a few minutes computer would just reboot and go through the whole process over again.
We ran a diagnostic on the computer and found that the hard drive was failing. We performed a data recovery for the customer backing up her pictures, music and documents.
We replaced the defective 250GB Western Digital Hard Drive and restored the computer back to its original state. Now this was a bit tricky because the customer didn’t have the Gateway Restore Disc and never had the Drivers & Applications Disc made. So a note to all you computer owners out there. Make sure when you buy a computer you find out weather the computer comes with recovery discs or not. If they don’t remember to make them immediately or have your computer repair shop make them for you.
Without these discs you may be putting your self in a position to not be able to use your computer until you obtain the recovery discs. Most manufactures are going to charge you for the discs if you have to order new ones. So save your self some time and money and make those discs if possible!
We were able to put all the data back on the computer and called the customer to let her know that the computer was finished. All in all it took about a day and a half to complete the work. Again we have experienced much longer wait times when talking to other customers. Some have said that they have taken their computers to other repair shops and had to wait well over a week or more before their computers were fixed!
So its nice to be able to fix these issues quickly and I know that the customer really appreciate having their computers back in a timely fashion.
If you are in need of computer repair please visit our website.
BLACKMAGICCOMPUTERS.COM: United States Coast Guard: Printer Repair
by admin on Nov.09, 2009, under Articles
We received a call from the United States Coast Guard here in Traverse City Michigan, stating that they needed their computer printer repaired. After giving them a quote for the price to repair the printer they seemed very interested as using our company for further computer related issues!
We at Blackmagic Computers are glad that we are able to help out our local coast guard and get their laser printer up and running.
If you are in need of computer repair please visit our website.
BLACKMAGICCOMPUTERS.COM:Video Of The Week: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Movie Trailer
by admin on Nov.09, 2009, under Articles
Video of the week Prince of Persia movie! Very excited to see that they are making this movie. To see the trailer go to our Blog.
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BLACKMAGICCOMPUTERS.COM: New York Marathon Winner Tests Positive For Performance-Enhancing Horse
by admin on Nov.06, 2009, under Articles
NEW YORK—Officials from New York Road Runners stripped American Meb Keflezighi of his 2009 ING New York City Marathon victory Wednesday after a blood sample taken from his fetlock was found to contain high levels of performance-enhancing horse.
“Meb’s fellow competitors voiced their doubts about him immediately after the event,” NYRR president Mary Wittenberg said. “In addition to his remarkable speed, unusual race-day height, and distinctive ‘clip-clop’ gait, Keflezighi’s frequent nickering caused the other runners to speculate that he may have been using a horse in some fashion.”
Added Wittenberg, “Also, just before the start, he lifted up his tail and loudly deposited a 9-inch-high pile of steaming fecal matter on the pavement, an unusual occurrence even in the world of long-distance running.”
Keflezighi finished the race in 48 minutes and 12 seconds, easily setting a new world record and defeating his nearest competitor by one hour and 20 minutes.
Course workers, spectators, and event sponsors have all presented damaging evidence pointing toward Keflezighi’s use of equine enhancements. Volunteers working refreshment tables during the race said Keflezighi took water only twice—at miles nine and 17—consuming roughly 10 gallons each time, and was the only professional runner in the men’s event to request an oat, carrot, and sugar lump station. In addition, a spokesman for Nike told reporters the company provided Keflezighi with six shoes for the marathon, four of which required special construction before being nailed onto his feet.
Hundreds of people who watched the race have also come forward with photographs showing Keflezighi mounted atop what experts now believe to be a 2-to-4-year-old chestnut-brown thoroughbred.
“Come to think of it, he was moving at a pace that didn’t seem human,” spectator Mark Rolland said. “And when the marathon was over, the American flag they tried to drape around him didn’t even come close to fitting around his body.”
“Last year he was just this small guy, but when he showed up to the starting line this year, his neck and head were noticeably thicker,” said David Willey, editor in chief of Runner’s World magazine. “He looked like he had put on at least a half ton of muscle.”
The NYRR’s Wittenberg said during a postrace press conference that if the evidence proves conclusively that Keflezighi used a horse to improve his speed and endurance, it would not only have a severe impact on his career, but could cast doubt on the whole culture of long-distance running.
“It may seem hard to believe this could happen, especially at this level,” said Dr. Raymond Prentiss, a medical adviser for USA Track & Field. “But people are so eager to believe in man’s ability to push the boundaries of achievement that they blind themselves to a competitor who looks a little too strong, runs a mile a few minutes faster, and stands a few hands taller than the competition.”
“In Keflezighi’s case, we ignored what his rapidly improving times, flowing mane, and shapely withers were trying to tell us until it was too late,” Prentiss added. “The fact that he was spending an hour after each event currycombing should have been a major tip-off.”
As of press time, Keflezighi is cooperating with the sanctioning bodies and has returned the $170,000 he was awarded for the victory. He has also surrendered his racing singlet and shorts, saddle, saddle blanket, and bridle for further inspection and testing by technical personnel. Officials with the World Marathon Majors series said that Keflezighi will likely be banned from future races, including Boston, Chicago, the 2010 Belmont Stakes, and Berlin.
In light of the discovery, marathon officials are taking a closer look at many of the entrants in this year’s race, including British runner Paula Radcliffe, a former winner who placed a tearful fourth in the women’s event after fracturing her cannon bone and had to be put down mere minutes after finishing.
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