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In the old days, tracing a phone number to its true owner was no big deal. But now, according to Brian “the voice mail systems involved in these sorts of scams usually are run off of free or low-cost Internet-based phone networks that are difficult to trace and shut down.”

As people get less trusting (deservedly so) of email, the bad guys hope victims put more
faith in phone numbers.

This introduction to vishing is offered in the hope that being aware of it makes you less likely to fall for a vishing based scam.

The crucial point is that just because someone or something says that a phone number belongs to a bank or credit union doesn’t make it true.

The story is likely to be that something bad has happened to your bank account, or is about to happen to it, and unless you call the phone number immediately you can kiss your money good-bye. The scammer hopes the story will scare you to the point that you don’t even consider the validity of the phone number.

Vishing is short for voice phishing. Voice refers to the fact that the scam is perpetrated over the phone. Phishing is a scam designed to “criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames,
passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity…”
according to Wikipedia.

Call your bank or credit union, but call the number in the phone book or on your statements. If it’s a scam, they should appreciate the heads up. They may not, but they should.

A recent article by Brian Krebs at WashingtonPost.com, The Anatomy of a Vishing Scam, describes a particular scam in detail and offers an education by example. In the case Brian describes, the initial contact with the victim was by text messaging to a cellphone, but it could just as well have been via email or instant messaging.

Browser war centers on once-obscure JavaScript

SonyEricsson warns of deepening losses

Report: Ballmer dishes on Apple

Requiem for a frog: SpiralFrog shuts down

Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

On Thursday afternoon when SpiralFrog quietly closed down, it became the second free music downloading site supported by ad sales to bite the dust this year. CNET News reporter Greg Sandoval, who broke the story of SpiralFrog’s demise, reflects on the future of free music online and whether any model can dislodge Apple’s iTunes dominance.

Editor’s note: Today’s whole podcast has now been uploaded. Enjoy!

Also in today’s podcast, Steve Ballmer speaks publicly about Apple, checking in on the latest battleground in the ongoing browser wars, turning trash into ethanol, and a look at the technology showcased in “Battlestar Galactica.”

Mississippi to open trash-to-ethanol plant

The technology of ‘Battlestar Galactica’

TomTom countersues Microsoft in patent dispute

Maritz will join the storage company as president and general manager of a newly created Cloud Infrastructure and Services division.

Financial terms of the all-cash transaction were not disclosed.

EMC on Thursday said it will acquire Pi, a cloud computing start-up founded by former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz.

“We’re saying that success in this new space will require a very different technology base–and a business model–very unlike other parts of the traditional IT landscape,” wrote Chuck Hollis, EMC’s global marketing chief technology officer, in his blog.

The software Pi is working on is designed to let people control, share, and publish information that is online or locally stored, according to the company’s Web site.

EMC said that Pi will fit into the company’s “cloud infrastructure” strategy. Cloud computing is the idea of building and running applications that run on the Web and are delivered as a service.

Privately held Pi, which has about 100 employees, is now beta-testing an online personal information management service (Pi stands for “personal information”).

Now Bill Gates has declared that
Windows 7, the next release of the operating system, won’t be nearly as bad as Vista:

Microsoft must spend some days gazing around in a stupor. The company continues to print money yet its most recent product launch of Vista fell on deaf ears. Microsoft of course wants money, but it also wants to be thought of as a leader in the software world, and with Vista it is definitely following…but who it’s following, nobody knows.

We’re hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I’m very excited about the work being done there…[which will require] lower power, take less memory [and] be more efficient.

commentary

Great! So…why buy Vista in the interim, which is by all accounts a memory and power hog, and is grossly inefficient? Customers seem to get Gates’ logic, however, and have been buying Macs in droves which requires less power, less memory, is more efficient, and is a heck of a lot nicer to use. Thanks for the advice, Bill!

Shorter Gartner (tip o’ the antlers to Daring Fireball):

Oh, man, we were so high when we wrote that!

Battery life is often a concern with faster spinning drives, but Hitachi claims it has improved this drive’s battery performance by 22 percent over its previous versions. It sucks up 1.8 watts of power when reading/writing data (the same as its 5,400rpm drive) and uses 0.8 watts when idling, versus the 5,400’s 0.55 watts.

Fujitsu announced its version back in March, but says its customers won’t get the drives until June. So, if Hitachi is quick about it, it could beat it to the punch. We’ll see–Hitachi says it’s drives are being built in the factory right now, and will be available to its customers later this month.

Hitachi is the third-largest producer of hard disk drives in the world, with 17.3 percent share of the market. The leader is Seagate Technology, which owns more than a third of the hard drive space.

The 2.5-inch Travelstar 7K320 can read and write data at 7,200rpm, which is the fastest spin speed for drives currently on the market.

Hitachi’s director of consumer and commercial hard drives, Larry Swezey, said with the release of the Travelstar 7K320, Hitachi “fixed the stumbling block” for 7,200rpm drives. Namely, that they couldn’t hold the same capacity as drives that spin at 5,400rpm.

Following Fujitsu, Hitachi is now stepping up to the plate with its 320GB hard drive for notebooks that also spins at 7,200rpm.

(Credit:
Hitachi)

All the worse for him, therefore, that he has to live with Novell’s mistakes. Microsoft convinced Novell to go along with its strategy to create a walled garden of “safe open source” (meaning, all open source that pays Microsoft a fee) versus “risky open source” (meaning, all open source that doesn’t pay Microsoft a fee). Red Hat was right to resist and push Microsoft to open up. Novell was wrong to capitulate.

I’ve long known that Miguel didn’t have his heart in that tie-up, so it was refreshing to see him go on the record at Microsoft’s own conference about Novell’s mistake in entering into the agreement:

commentary

In the past I’ve criticized Miguel de Icaza, Novell’s rock star open-source developer, for getting too cozy with Microsoft. Even so, I’ve never doubted Miguel’s commitment to open source.

For once, I have nothing to add.

I’m not happy about the fact that such an agreement was made, but [the decision] was above my pay grade; I think we should have stayed with the open-source community.

When Netflix opted to eliminate profiles, the company said that the feature was only used by a small sliver of its member base. It was a vocal sliver, however, and a thread on customer service forum Get Satisfaction revealed a host of angry users, ranging from families who wanted to keep parental controls on separate queues for their children to spouses who didn’t want to bicker over disparate film tastes.

With members threatening cancellation or–shudder!–a switch to troubled rival Blockbuster, it clearly wasn’t a great move on Netflix’s part. Response to it had been overwhelmingly negative, and the company clearly got clued in.

The people have spoken: Netflix will not be eliminating user profiles, the account feature that lets you split movie rentals among separate queues for a household. The company had announced the removal of profiles earlier this month, much to user dismay.

“As someone who enjoys helping his 4-year-old daughter manage her one-DVD-at-a-time, G-rated sub-account, I identified with these thoughtful pleas to maintain Profiles,” a Netflix product manager identified only as “Todd” wrote on the company’s blog. “Because of an ongoing desire to make our website easier to use, we believed taking a feature away that is only used by a very small minority would help us improve the site for everyone. Listening to our members, we realized that users of this feature often describe it as an essential part of their Netflix experience.”

Now visit the Windows Update Troubleshooter and browse around for an entry relating to the error. If nothing on this page solves the problem, try disabling your antivirus and anti-spyware programs, your firewall, and any Web accelerators you’ve installed before going to the Windows Update page. Just be sure to reactivate your security programs before you browse anywhere else.

Windows won’t update
First, make sure you’re logged into an administrator account. Next, open the Windows Update log, which is at C:\Windows\Windows Update.log, and look for an error message, which may include an error code you can search for in Microsoft’s knowledge bases. (Make sure you have Windows set to show hidden files: Open Windows Explorer, and in XP, click Tools>Folder Options>View>Show hidden files and folders; in Vista, click Organize>Folder and Search Options>View>Show hidden files and folders.)

The Registry has gone haywire
The fastest and simplest way to repair a garbled Registry is via Windows’ System Restore: In XP, click Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>System Restore>Restore my computer to an earlier time (likely selected by default)>Next. Choose a restore point on the calendar, and step through the wizard. In Vista, press the Windows key, type “system restore,” and press Enter. Vista recommends a restore point; if you approve, click Next>Finish. Otherwise, click Choose a different restore point>Next, make your selection, and step through the wizard.

Scan your Windows Update log file for clues to your system's update failures.

Stop Windows from restarting automatically after a crash by unchecking Automatically restart in the Startup and Recovery Settings dialog box.

If your shutdowns are just slow, Windows may be clearing your virtual memory and system-hibernation cache (sleep mode in Vista) when it closes, which adds considerably to the shutdown process. To reset this option, click Start>Run (in Vista, simply press the Windows key), type gpedit.msc, and press Enter to open the Group Policy Editor. Navigate in the left pane to Computer Configuration>Windows Settings>Security Settings>Local Policies>Security Options, double-click Shutdown: Clear virtual memory pagefile, choose Disabled (if it isn’t selected already), and click OK.

If you’re still unable to update Windows, here are three more things you can try:
Check your clock to make sure your PC is set to the correct time and date. Double-click the time in the bottom-right corner of the screen to open the Date and Time Properties dialog box (in Vista, click Change date and time settings).
Log into another administrator account and try to update. If you don’t have two administrator accounts, open the User Accounts Control Panel applet, click Create a new account (in Vista, select Manage Another Account first), and step through the wizard, choosing Computer administrator as the account type (Administrator in Vista).
Start Windows in Safe Mode and retry the update. To enter Safe Mode, press F8 after your PC starts but before Windows loads, and choose Safe Mode from the resulting menu.
You’ll find more update-troubleshooting options on DTS-L.org’s Windows Update Checklist.

Tomorrow: Remedies for Windows networking and hardware failures.

You always have to be careful when you make changes to the Registry, which is why you should triple-check any Registry-cleaning utilities before you use them. One that has been around for a while is TweakNow’s RegCleaner Standard (the company also offers a $27 Professional version).

Windows breaks; it’s a fact. Sometimes the only fix you need is a system restart, but other times you may feel like you’ll never get your PC working again. While not even a building full of Microsoft engineers can promise solutions to every Windows problem, these tips will help you begin your quest for a cure.

This doesn’t address the cause of the “crashes”, however. A primary reason for such failures is a hardware or software conflict, so if you’ve recently installed some device or program, check the vendor’s Web site for updated firmware or a new driver (more on fixing hardware conflicts tomorrow).

Vista's System Restore applet chooses a restore point for you, or you can opt to select another.

Windows doesn’t know when to quit
Sometimes Windows reboots when you only want it to turn off. This may be caused by the OS thinking a shutdown is actually a crash, which it is programmed to respond to by restarting. To disable this feature, right-click My Computer (Computer in Vista), choose Properties>Advanced (Properties>Advanced system settings>Advanced in Vista), and click Settings under Startup and Recovery. Uncheck Automatically restart under System failure, and click OK.

As it promised to do, Google has begun testing ads shown next to image search results.

(Credit:
CNET News)

Google has begun showing ads next to image search results. (Click to enlarge.)

Google’s cash cow is its ability to display small text ads next to search results, but the new examples include pictures as well. That could be more distracting or more useful, depending on how you see it, but Google insists that it’ll place the ads only in a way that adds to the user experience, one measurement of which is that people search more often.

Google Blogoscoped and TechCrunch carried screen shots from readers showing the new tests, and Search Engine Land added a shot of a banner ad as well. Now I’m seeing the image ads too.