Your computer has been attacked scam call

A phone call came in this evening presumably from India. The woman explained that the computer in our house had some problems and they were going to help us.

"What kind of computer, is it Windows XP?" I said yes.

"Press the flag key and the R as in Romeo, both at the same time."

"In the Run box type "eventvwr". Click Application, Security, System, etc, do you see the errors in there? That means that your computer has an infection".

"Your computer having too much problem.

1 Error means 62 infections.
1 Warning means 65 infections.

I can help you. Hold while I transfer you to a supervisor who can help you...."

"I am Peter, I am the senior supervisor on the floor. I guess my analyst has already shown you all the error and warning signs.

You know why the call has been placed to you? We got some error reports from your computer, as we are a Microsoft Certified Partner we have to check whether your computer is fine or not".

Me: How did you get the error report, did you get that from Microsoft?

"Exactly, but we are not Microsoft, Microsoft doesn't call any customers".

"The thing is that as you are using original Microsoft operating system you are registered with Microsoft.

We need to scan your computer to tell you the exact reason. We are Microsoft certified engineers".

He got me to run "iexplorer" from the run box, presumably to avoid me using Firefox or Chrome.

I was directed to: www.credentit.com

Click Australia.

"I'll give you a six digit code, which is confidential, do not give it to anyone else".

Then this downloaded something called LMIRescue which is an installer for some sort of remote control software.



As you can guess, I did not install this software and ended the call politely. A quick search shows that I am not alone in receiving this scam call.

credentit.com is controlled by:

Administrative Contact:
    n/a
    Siddharth  Sengupta        (credent2010@live.com)
    Flat 1/ BC Victoria Appartment
    Duke Gardens , VIP Road
    Kolkata
    West Bengal,700059
    IN
    Tel. +91.9051255072

Be very careful. Audio here, enjoy.

Amateur Radio Home Brew at Dural

A lovely day for a trip to Dural. The photographer in me appreciates the nice side light.

Here's Tim, VK2ZTM:



And Peter, VK2EMU:



Peter showed a neat idea for testing toroid cores without needing a non-50 ohm dummy load, he made a step down and step up pair:



Graham, VK2GRA, showed his excellent work with a 9m squid pole used as an HF vertical with tape measures as non-resonant counterpoises:



But the star of the day was Bob Mutton VK2ZRM showed his fantastic work on a high power solid state linear amplifier:



One of the many interesting things is the ARF463 A and B which are a matched pair but with different pin outs designed for push pull operation while earthing the source on each.



I had to rush off to a family function but happily the dog hadn't got the apple pie by the time I arrived.

Film night at the Mu-Meson archive

I've been mourning the death of true HD (1080p) broadcast television as one by one the stations re-allocate their digital bandwidth to create channels for junk TV repeats rather than HD.

What a tragedy it was to see the marvellous BBC series Life broadcast in standard definition on ABC1 over past weeks. If it's anything like the BBC Earth series, with it's stunning HD camera work, it would have been breathtaking. Apparently the Australian public doesn't care too much about quality of the image.

This week I had the great pleasure of watching a reel film at the Mu-Meson archive.



Irving Gribbish, AKA Mr Q, (who runs Splodge! in Melbourne) came to town with an excellent 16mm copy of "All this and World War II".



He gave an informative introduction and analysis of the film and we settled back in comfortable chairs to watch.



At half time, while the film re-wound, the friendly Miss Death even served soup.



All this joy for just $10. Thanks Mu-Meson!

Android Everywhere

Gartner group is predicting that the war between mobile phone operating systems will end with Google's Android on top.

I decided to forego the iPhone 4 and try living in Google land for a year or so. As previously blogged I purchased an HTC Desire. After my intense dislike for all the Telstra rubbish it came with I rooted the phone and have been installing each version of the OpenDesire build as they came out.

Until this week it's been a pretty good experience but for some reason the phone started hanging every few hours. Unfortunately I broke the programmer's rule and made two changes at the same time - updating the Radio firmware and the OS, so I couldn't be sure which was the problem.

Anyhow, the firmware that seems most popular is CyanogenMod. One difference is that the Google apps need to be installed separately.

24 hours later all seems to be well with the phone. I can't blame OpenDesire as it may well be that simply wiping the phone fixed up some sort of corruption.

For some reason my phone burned through 105% of my 200MB data allowance last month. I can only think that it was something running in the background sucking down podcasts when I didn't know. Everyone yelled at Apple for not doing multi-tasking but when you get what you wish for sometimes it not what you want.

My current stable configuration is Android 2.2, Baseband 32.47.00.32U_5.10.05.23, and OS CyanogenMod-6.0.1-Desire.

Update: changed ROM

I found that on Cyanogen and also then when I switched back to OpenDesire, the phone would work fine for a few days and then hang. It's still alive at some level because the message LED would flash, but nothing would wake it except removing the battery.

Now I've switched to AuraxTSense_7.8.1_Official_OTA_2.2_FRF91 and radio 32.44.00.32U_5.09.05.30_2 and 48 hours in all is well so far. One clear improvement over the others is that when I start using the phone and am in a Wifi area that it knows about the phone now uses the Wifi first rather than starting on 3G data and later switching.

Update: wifi problems

Unfortunately I am seeing some intermittent problems re-connecting to wifi. Sometimes it seems to be connected but apps can't load from the internet.

Android Tablets

There are a lot of cheap Android tablets on eBay and thankfully my colleague Dennis saved me the trouble and bought one.



Yes it runs Android, but the touch screen is so bad and the OS is so unresponsive that a quick play with the gadget leaves you with the impression that it's only use is as a bad digital picture frame.

Android may well being on every device on the planet but it may end up with a reputation for being dodgy compared to Apple's closely curated world. I do miss the iPhone and have recently ended up carrying an iPod just for podcasts.

Climbing towers video

Do not watch if you suffer from vertigo.

An earlier copy of this has been removed so it's likely this one will disappear soon too.

Update

It was removed, you can now see it at the Make blog.