I don’t know anyone who isn’t caught up in the holiday spirit by now. Getting together with family and exchanging gifts certainly is one of the highlights most of us enjoy. From our team at Nerds On Site, here are some techtips you may enjoy or find useful and add to your office or home enjoyment.

1. Tracking Santa. cnet did a great article on Four great ways to track Santa this Christmas. This one is great fun for everyone at work and at home.

1. Letters To Santa (and videos in return). A Dear Santa letter was found 100 years later in Ireland which has warmth written all over it. Kids all over are writing Santa and now apparently Santa sends video emails back. So for your son, daughter, niece, nephew, someone near to your heart, spend a few minutes filling in some details and voilá, you’ve got a personally-greeted and customized video ready to be sent. Just for fun, if you’re old-fashioned, read this letter to Santa for a good laugh.

• Batteries. I know it never fails in my family, perhaps you’re a better planner. But with little kids and the variety of batteries required these days, there’s always a shortage of batteries by the evening of December 25th, and again the first or second week of January. So it’s not too late to get a good deal on batteries at a place like monoprice.com (not available in SA). Please be environmentally responsible and recycle old batteries properly. any electronic stores offer free recycling of old batteries.

BONUS TIP: If some of your family is not with you in person, consider having a video chat to include them in some of your family time. Three easy ways were just published in our previous blog posting.

Merry Christmas from the Nerds!

In light of reduced SPAM as of late, I was somewhat surprised to see phishing and theft attempts as sophisticated as this come through to my inboxes today – at least one in each of my different email addresses, but all came from email accounts of friends on Facebook. I searched the major anti-virus and malware vendors as well as google and twitter and nothing turned up, so maybe I’m just one of the first to be hit. Here’s a message I received, and a similar one in each of my mailboxes:

A few other variations are as follows:

SUBJECT: Very good
BODY: Click here to read this message

SUBJECT: wooow
BODY: click here to see the attached video

In each case the “click here…” is hyperlinked to somethingrandom.l13.me and the URL also contains the actual email address of you, the recipient.

It appears the originator of this spam/phishing attack at the very least is validating email addresses of people opening the message.

I also tried checking Google’s SafeBrowsing service at this URL:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=l13.me

At the time of this writing, here is the result showing that it has not detected any malware on this site. I suspect this will change overnight:

In case some great SPAM researchers come across this article, here is the full RAW source (except my email address has been replaced with someone@notavaliddomain.ca):

Part 1 of 2:

Part 2 of 2:

If you choose to click on URL in the email itself, that’s when the spammer’s phishing attack begins, and will prompt you for your Windows Live username & password. Note that it is NOT live.com, however, which means you’re giving your username and password directly to the thief:

As you might expect, the domain itself (l13.me) was only registered a week ago, and has its real ownership disguised:

The same domain ownership disguise applies to videos4you.net where the phishing is actually hosted.

And finally, when I check to see where all the “click here to view this message” are being served from (somethingsomewhere.l13.me) they point to IP address 69.64.54.99 which is registered to Hosting Solutions International:

Naturally, I have advised the abuse email address of this clearly-malicious intent and hope to have a quick response. I don’t have any misgivings about how quickly the attacker can direct web traffic to a new host, or start generating spam with a newly-created domain elsewhere. The cat-and-mouse games just continue…

I just hope this anatomy of this particular SPAM message helps somebody somewhere avoid these types of traps, and perhaps we can all find a solution to cleaner and more productive email.

UPDATE #1:

IF you’re a victim, here is Microsoft’s article on what to do:

http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/phishing-scams.aspx#Victim

[this post is from Jonathan Arnoldussen, a Nerd in Lethbridge, Canada, and a leader of our Online Services Team]

November 8th was not a good day for our e-mail clients. Basically, the server’s response time was extremely poor, leading to our valuable clients experiencing extreme email slowdowns for much of the day. Why did this happen? On our Hosting Blog, We do our best to give a quick overview, what we are doing to resolve this problem, and what our clients can do to help.

You may look at your inbox right now and remark that you really don’t have that much email in it.  However, if you have not set the ‘Remove from server’ options, all that email does still exist on our mail server, and thus your email client is still scanning all that email.  Even though you think it was deleted, it actually isn’t.

Please read the article on our Hosting Blog, and learn about the problems with keeping hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of emails in your webmail inbox. Many of our Nerds have let us know that by implementing the steps in that blog article, their client’s email experience has suddenly become a lot more pleasant!

If you operate or work at a small business, having the ability to print is vital. If your printer is simply hooked up directly to one of the computers, you may notice a bit of a delay in printing, or that you can’t print when that computer is turned off.

Your computer is acting as a middle-man. Although it may be a functional and practical setup most of the time, it can also be annoying. If something were to happen to that computer, no one would be able to send documents to that printer.

A better approach is to hook up the printer directly to the network. This is only possibly if the printer has an ethernet port, and if there isn’t a spare ethernet port, an ethernet cable may need to be connected it to the router or switch. Your network may also need other changes to make this a reality, so it’s best to talk to your IT department, or contact Nerds On Site, and we’ll be happy to set things up for you.

Having the printer hooked up directly to the network allows anytime access to that printer, making it easy to quickly send documents to it.

If you are using Outlook (any version), and you have managed to reset the security level for e-mails, There are two things you need to do to help prevent malicious emails from affecting your computer. The first step is to turn the ‘Reading Pane’ ‘Off’, then turn the ‘Auto-Preview’ on, which will only displays the first three lines of the message, which should be enough to tell if the email is safe to read or simply junk.

Here is how to disable the Reading Pane and enable Auto Preview.

1. Open Outlook.
2. Choose View -> Reading Pane -> Off

1. Choose View -> AutoPreview
2. Now you can see what is Junk, and which ones may have an HTML payload.

Hat tip to www.sans.org for the tips!

Results of a Harvard study proved that buyers who initially objected to price eventually made their buying decision on non-price factors.

Now that’s what we at Nerds On Site want to hear! So what do buyers value more than price?

#7: Immediately noticing problems

Don’t wait for the client to figure out you’ve missed a delivery date. Step up and tell them early!

#6: Easy to understand communications

“Dumb down” your communications into easy to understand language. Clients don’t have the time or patience to figure out what you’re trying to say. Forget the jargon – speak English!

#5: Product/industry knowledge

Making sure you know everything there is to know about YOUR products and services is a given. You can add even more value when you share industry knowledge! Help them be better at what they do!

#4: Breadth and depth of offerings

Don’t you appreciate it when you can go to one place and have all your needs fulfilled? Like my grocery store where I can buy flowers, wine, cigars (hardly) and have my dry cleaning done. Take the time to notice gaps in your offerings and figure out how you can bridge them!

#3: Understanding the uniqueness of each client

Even if your clients all sell the same thing (i.e., chocolates) there’s something different about each one of them. Take specific differences into account for each client.

#2: Reliability, dependability, consistency

Nothing screams – I CARE – more than always doing what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it! Say it, do it, prove it.

#1: A relationship built on trust, honesty and integrity

Clients will support you in any number of ways once you’ve proven that you’re in it for them, and have their best interests at hear.

[a post from Nerd Kevin Lloyd]

On almost every client service call we have had over the past year, we have installed Dropbox on their computers. It takes only moments to setup, it’s free, and once we explain the benefits, every client has expressed excitement about the service!

The concept of Dropbox is simple, and I always give a practical example to my clients. I have three computers, one of which is a laptop. I have Dropbox installed on each of them. Dropbox creates a folder, like any other, on each computer, and anything I put into that folder on each computer, appears on each of my other computers within minutes, automatically, providing there is an internet connection, or, as soon as there is one.

In addition, you can log into your Dropbox account on dropbox.com and access my files there as well.

The free version comes with 2GB free, and 50GB is only $10 a month. I have a couple of friends that use it reguarly praise how useful it is! In addition, you get 250MB free for each person you refer Dropbox to (using your referral link)

If you’re interested, check out their website!

Sometimes it helps to be old enough to remember how things were done in “pre-historic” times BEFORE there were computers on every desktop. To get a little perspective on the value of technology, ask clients how many more employees they would need if they had NO computers in the office. Even in a small office, most businesses would need at LEAST one additional employee. In a larger office, that number would be much higher. The work done would also be more costly in terms of paper, travel time, etc……not to mention more error-prone. Much of what computers do could simply NEVER be done by humans at a reasonable cost.

Now ask your client what those employees would cost, in terms of salaries, benefits, and, well, the other “costs” of having additional employees. The cost of the computer and a NerdCare plan to keep it running smoothly starts to look incredibly affordable in this context. In addition, the headaches that occasionally arise with computers don’t seem quite so bad when you compare them to the headaches and complexities that come with their, er….human counterparts.

So ask the question: What would you have to pay humans to do all the things these computers do every day? $4,000, $6,000, $10,000 per month? Makes that NerdCare plan to keep those “digital employees” well fed and happy seem like a pretty good bargain.

Dennis H in West Virginia, US

April 30, 2010