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Show of 5-4-2013

Email and Forum Questions

  • Email from Mary in Bethesda: Dear Doc Shurtz,   I often find people on LinkedIn I’d like to be able to send an email to. I don’t have a paid for level of access to LinkedIn and therefore can’t send an ‘inmail’ to them.
  • I have learned over time that if you know where someone works (and on LinkedIn the current position is listed), you can go into google and search on for example, @intel.com
  • and often find someone’s email and then learn the ‘recipe’ of whether email is firstname.lastname, or whatever. What I am wondering is, hasn’t someone come up with a master list resource someone with this need of mine can go to and put in a company name and learn the firm’s email formula/recipe?
  • Your thoughts are appreciated. This show of yours is a treasure and you serve the listeners with a beneficial resource that I find of real value. I hope U and Jim have a great summer :  ). Mary, Bethesda
  • Tech Talk Responds:  Mary, this is a great idea. I could not find any such service. You can use LinkedIn Inmail for $10 a pop if you are not a member. I can give you some tips on locating the email address using the advanced search tools in Google.
  • If you know the person’s name, you can search for “First Last” email @domain. This will give you a list of all webpages that list the email address. Usually, the email is private and only located in documents (word, excel, etc.) You can search only in documents for the email address using the following search sequence. Here would be the search sequence for this specific search: “First Last” email @domain filetype:pdf  filetype:doc  filetype:xls filetype:ppt. Only use one file type at a time when doing the search!
  • Email from Tung in Ohio: Dear Doc and Jim. My friend has been sending me small videos via text messages. I would love to be able to make my own movies and send to him via text message. These are private movies so I want to send them myself. How can I do this? We listen to the live stream each Saturday morning. Love the show. Tung in Ohio.
  • Tech Talk Responds: Tung, you cannot send a movie using text messages. You are simply attaching a picture to the text message. In your case the image is a specially formatting image. Rather than a simple JPG format, you are receiving images are formatted as GIF images.
  • GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It is bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the web. GIF supports animation by displaying a series of images in fast succession.  If the GIF is formatted to loop the movie will continue indefinitely.
  • Photoshop can be used to make animated GIFs. You can create a series of images and Photoshop can format them as an animated GIF.  Photoshop will also open videos in MPEG, MP4, AVI, and MOV formats. When you open it, select Range to Import to get only a few select frames—the fewer the frames, the faster the animated GIF. It will import the frames as layers, which you’ll convert back to frames for the animated GIF file. You can even resize and crop the layers to produce a smaller the animation.
  • Picasion.com lets you create an animated GIF by uploading individual photos. They must all be resized to the same dimensions. You can also use your own Webcam to get an animation of yourself. With the Webcam option, you can set a speed from slower to faster and a size from Userpic (100 pixels wide) up to big (400 pixels wide), and let the site do the rest of the work.
  • Gifninja is another free option. If you’ve got a video file that’s smaller than 20MB, Gifninja will accept it as an upload and turn the first few frames into a very good animated GIF.
  • Email from Sophia in Alexandria: Dear Tech Talk, I keep have an advertising pop up on my computer and I can’t get rid of it. When I do a search, my browser keeps going to the same website for some type of prize. I am using Windows XP and IE9. What should I do? Thanks, Sophia in Alexandria
  • Tech Talk Responds: This sounds like a browser hijack. A browser hijack is a type of malware that infects your system. Once downloaded, it waits until you do an internet search; when it sees a page with search results, it updates the results with its own links to advertisements or other websites. No matter what you click on, you see what the malware wants to show you.
  • You definitely want to treat this as malware. My first suggestion would be to make sure you’re running up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spyware scans. It sounds like whatever tool that you’re using worked once before, but I would also consider running Malwarebytes, a free tool available for download at malwarebytes.org.
  • After you’ve taken the malware off of your computer, my first suggestion is to watch what you’re doing. The key to preventing problems like this is vigilance and good anti-malware software that’s up-to-date.
  • Email from Wije in Sri Lanka: Dear Tech Talk, I am in Colombo, Sri Lanka and listen to the podcast each week. My computer is locked up and I am told that in order to unlock it that I will have to pay $300. They are implying that I have done something wrong. What should I do? Love the show, Wije
  • Tech Talk Responds: You have been infected by ransom ware. We covered a type of ransom ware a couple of weeks ago. It was the FBI scam, where you were told that your computer was locked because you had visited child porn sites. You have a similar infection.
  • ‘Ransomware’ is a type of malware that attempts to extort money from a computer user by infecting and taking control of the victim’s machine, or the files or documents stored on it. Typically, the ransom ware will either ‘lock’ the computer to prevent normal usage, or encrypt the documents and files on it to prevent access to the saved data.
  • The ransom demand will then be displayed, usually either via a text file or as a webpage in the web browser. This type of malware leverages the victim’s surprise, embarrassment and/or fear to push them into paying the ransom demanded.
  • Ransomware may arrive as part of another malware’s payload, or may be delivered by an exploit kit such as Black hole, which exploits vulnerabilities on the affected computer to silently install and execute the malware.
  • Though earlier ransomware samples tended to be simple, blatant attempts at extortion, recent ones have been more subtle in design. In 2012, there were multiple instances of ‘police-themed’ ransomware that cunningly disguise their ransom demands as official-looking warning messages from a local law enforcement agency.
  • In most cases, F-Secure’s Easy Clean removal tool is able to remove the ransomeware, restoring normal access to the system. Many other removal tools are available from legitimate anti-virus vendors. Here is a link to one that I have used.
  • http://www.f-secure.com/en/web/labs_global/removal-tools/
  • Email from Don: Dear Tech Talk, I would like to use Google drive on my PC and my iPhone. How does it work? Love the show. Thanks, Don
  • Tech Talk Responds: Google drive is an Internet based storage system, aka Cloud Storage. You will need to download the Google Drive app on the iPhone and create an account using your Gmail user name and password. Then you will need to go to the Google Drive webpage on your PC and click the download PC application. That applications will create a Google drive on your PC, after to login with your Gmail user name and password. Any document that you put into your Google drive folder will be synchronized with the drive on your cell phone. Any document can be opened using Goolgle docs. It is very easy to use and set up.

Profiles in IT: Max Rafael Levchin

  • Max Rafael Levchin is a Ukrainian-born American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur was co-founder and chief technology officer of PayPal
  • Max Rafael Levchin was born July 11, 1975 in Kyiv, Ukraine to a Jewish family.
  • He moved to the US, under political asylum, and settled in Chicago in 1991.
  • He attended Mather High School and earned his BS Computer Science from the University of Illinois in 1997.
  • In 1998, Levchin founded Fieldlink with John Bernard and Peter Thiel. After changing the name to Confinity, they developed a payment product known as PayPal.
  • After a merger with X.com, the combined entity was renamed PayPal Inc.
  • He was instigator of poker night, a PayPal tradition.
  • He led the development of an antifraud program called Igor, named after a Russian fraudster it helped apprehend in 2000. The FBI enlisted Igor to combat wire fraud.
  • PayPal Inc. went public in February 2002, and was subsequently acquired by eBay.
  • Levchin’s 2.3% stake in PayPal was worth $34 million at the time of the acquisition.
  • He was the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA.
  • In 2002, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35, as well as Innovator of the Year.
  • In 2004, Levchin founded Slide, a personal media-sharing service for social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
  • Slide was sold to Google in August 2010 for $182 Million and, on August 25, Levchin joined as Vice President of Engineering.
  • On 26 August 2011, Google shut down Slide and that Levchin left Google.
  • He helped start Yelp, a social network review site. He is currently Chairman.
  • Levchin was an executive producer for the movie Thank You for Smoking.
  • In 2012, Levchin co-authored, with Garry Kasparov and Peter Thiel, The Blueprint: Reviving Innovation, Rediscovering Risk, and Rescuing the Free Market.
  • In 2008 he married his longtime girlfriend, Nellie Minkova.
  • He is currently working on hard, valuable and fun data-focused problems. He believes that low-cost sensors, ubiquitous wireless broadband, distributed computing and storage, have made data is our most plentiful, and under-exploited, commodity.
  • He believes that the insights mined from it will unlock enormous productivity gains, create efficiencies where none existed before, and meaningfully improve lives.
  • Personal website: http://www.levchin.com/
  • Hard, Valuable, and Fun website; http://hvf.cc/
  • Twitter account: @mlevchin with 51,000 followers, where he calls himself an entrepreneur, investor, coder, cyclist, coffee snob.

Dumb Idea of the Week: The Buddy Cup

  • Budweiser has figured out a way to help it add to your Facebook friends list.
  • The Buddy Cup, unveiled by the company’s Brazilian arm, contains “high-tech chip technology integrated with Facebook” that makes two people friends on Facebook when they clink their glasses together in a toast.
  • The cup is paired with a Facebook account by using a QR code printed on the bottom, and a red LED serves as confirmation that you have a new friend.
  • According to The Drum, the cups will be used at sponsored Budweiser events such as festivals, and are designed to “enhance brand activation and increase the interaction between Budweiser consumers.”
  • Hopefully those consumers are comfortable granting Timeline access to anyone else with a beer.

Fake Twitter Followers: A Dirty Marketing Secret

  • Large brands and stars are purchasing fake followers to puff up their social media presence.
  • To understand how one identifies the presence of fake followers, a little pattern study must happen.
  • In the case of someone who has purchased fake followers, the account generally sees a spike in user numbers followed by an equivalent drop in the number of followers about a month later.
  • According to the New York Times, two Italian security researchers, Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, are naming a few of the larger buyers of such fake followers.
  • A list that includes brands like Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz and Louis Vuitton , politicians like Newt Gingrich, Representative Jared Polis and Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, and the rappers 50 Cent and Sean Combs, known as Diddy.
  • 1000 followers can reportedly be purchased for around $5, increasing the amount of followers on an account can become a relatively inexpensive way to improve one’s perceived visibility.
  • Burst campaigns, where a brand or star purchases large amounts of followers can easily be traced because they show sudden increases that tend to be out of step with traditional patterns.
  • In the report the New York Times cities, music artist Diddy saw sharp rises and falls in his account in June 2012, rap singer 50 cent saw similar swings this past January, and brands like Mercedes and Pepsi bounced up and down in atypical ways in October and November 2012.

Serial Port Scans Find Hackable Devices

  • Serial ports are nine-pin plugs that were once used to hook up a mouse or joystick to your computer in the pre-USB dark ages.
  • According to H.D. Moore, any hacker can find–and tamper with–more than 100,000 of them over the Internet, including critical systems ranging from traffic lights to fuel pumps to building heating and cooling systems to retail point-of-sale devices.
  • Moore, chief research officer at the security firm Rapid, presented new research at the Infosec Southwest conference held April 2013, showing how he was able to locate and access a hidden layer of vulnerable machines via 114,000 devices known as “serial servers” or “terminal servers”–systems that allow outmoded hardware to be accessed remotely over the Internet via their serial ports.
  • Some companies have continued to use older, serial-connected equipment, and have bought networking gear made by vendors like Digi and Lantronix to connect those legacy systems to modern networks.
  • As a result, Moore says that many of those outmoded systems have been left entirely exposed to hackers.
  • Analyzing a database of a year’s worth of Internet scan results he’s assembled known as Critical.io, as well as other data from the 2012 Internet Census, Moore discovered that thousands of devices had no authentication, weak or no encryption, default passwords, or had no automatic “log-off” functionality, leaving them pre-authenticated and ready to access.
  •  Although he was careful not to actually tamper with any of the systems he connected to, Moore says he could have in some cases switched off the ability to monitor traffic lights, disabled trucking companies’ gas pumps or faked credentials to get free fuel, sent fake alerts over public safety system alert systems, and changed environmental settings in buildings to burn out equipment or turn off refrigeration, leaving food stores to rot.
  • About 95,000 of the devices were connected via Edge, GPRS and 3G cellular modems, creating connections that Moore says wouldn’t be monitored by corporate firewalls. And in other cases Moore found Virtual Private Network servers and routers connected via the serial servers within corporations’ networks, creating a backdoor for hackers hoping to further penetrate a network or steal data.

New Digital Camera Based on Bug Eye

  • Researchers say the insect-inspired technology can provide full, 180-degree fields of view with no interpretive mistakes in image quality.
  • A team of researchers at several universities around the world has created a new digital camera technology that takes cues from bug eyes.
  • The technology, which has not yet been named, is designed after the eyes found in arthropods. The camera is equipped with a many of image sensors and focusing lenses around a hemispherical base. With the sensors arranged in that way, the camera can take complete 180-degree pictures with no interpretive mistakes in image quality.
  • “Full 180 degree fields of view with zero aberrations can only be accomplished with image sensors that adopt hemispherical layouts — much different than the planar CCD chips found in commercial cameras.
  • This type of hemispherical design provides unmatched field of view and other powerful capabilities in imaging.”
  • The technology is by no means simple. Once the lenses are in place, they each snap a small image of the subject, based on their angle. Those images then come together to create a single picture of the subject.
  • More information on the technology has been published today in the latest issue of “Nature.”