Archive for April, 2006:

I have literally just received this flyer through my inbox. Good to see that the University has decided to ditch the paper flyers - the amount of trees that were being wasted…

Who’s Getting Crunk then?

“Oh dear!“, I can hear most of you saying, “…not another!”

Yes! Whilst browsing some random websites in my afternoon, I came across this. The Pirates of the Carribean - MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game!

Like Galaxies, World of Warcraft, or Guild Wars - but with Pirates.

To buy or not to buy… that is the question.

Bit-tech have a review of the highly anticipated Tomb Raider : Legend. I say highly, as it has a lot to live up to, seeing how well the first few did. It also needs to be a lot better than Angel of Darkness, seeing how terrible that was - so terrible that I played it once, then left it to collect dust for a year or so, before trading it in.

I’m grabbing the Demo as I type, because last week their server seemed to have too much traffic to download it (timeouts galore). If that runs OK and I like it, then I’ll head on over to Amazon to purchase it for £17.99. Interestingly, Play.com also stock it at £17.99.

If any of you have played the game, leave me your comments! If you’re feeling generous, then look at my wishlist.

I feel like Sherlock after doing all this - at least I know I’ve got something to fall back on if computers fade away…

I received an e-mail a day or two ago, which was supposedly from Chase, who after some research on my behalf, appear to be an online bank based in the US. Instantly I smelt a rat, well maybe a fart if I’d let one rip - I don’t bank with Chase. And so my investigation began…

First up, we have source A, the original e-mail received from ‘Chase’. As you can see, I’ve added some pink brush strokes in Photoshop to highlight the ‘dodgy’ areas:

* UID - which probably stands for Unique Identifier, or useless idiot details. I don’t have a UID for Chase, in fact I’ve never heard of them.

* Customer - nope. Again, not me.

* Locked - I never use it, so do I care if you’ve locked my imaginary account? No.

* Account - I don’t friggin’ have one!

* jmorlan@ccsf.org - strange. I could have sworn your domain was completely different to that.

So, with source A analysed, I moved onto source B - the official chase site.

Looks very professional, and the logo matches the e-mail. Maybe they got me mixed up with someone else?

That’s where source C kicks in. Their ‘login’ page, which was linked to within the e-mail (twice!) doesn’t look at all like their website. Maybe they hired a different webmaster for that particular day? Hardly.

They’ve been quite clever with it all though, as the links on the login page take you to Chase’s own web-pages. But to top it all off, we have source D.

This gave it away totally. To the unsuspecting victims, the address looks legit. But to the more observant out there, you’ll notice that it is in fact a sub-domain called ‘chaseonline.chase.com‘ on the domain ‘jpchase-respond.com‘. Odd - I thought they were chase.com???

With the new lead in hand, I pointed my browser at whois where I discovered source E.

Looking through the results, it’s plain to see that Terri Galloway owns the domain, and he doesn’t appear to be linked in anyway to Chase themselves.

If you’re bored, send Terri an e-mail by click here. Tell him he should get a real job.

And that, readers, is how you tell if an e-mail from a bank is legitmate or not. Chase are combatting fraud, more information can be found here.

If the FBI wish to employ me, then hit Contact on the sidebar to the right, where you’ll find a few e-mail addresses that I regularly use.

I’ve just finished setting up a great extension for firefox.

Those of you that have more than one computer, or several users on the same machine, along with a set of bookmarks for each, will find it very useful.

Basically it requires you to have access to an ftp account in order to store your synchronised bookmarks. You then setup the extension on all of the firefox installs you wish to use it on, and let it do its stuff.

So, I set it up 4 times this evening - once on my server and 3 times on all 3 users on my laptop. I’ll probably set it up a 5th time at work tomorrow. I then organised all of my bookmarks on my laptop, and then synchronised them. Each time I login to a different user, or different computer and open Firefox, the bookmarks are synchronised allowing me to take the same set from place to place. Perfect!

You can get Bookmark Sync and Sort here.