Computer Repair Experts in Phoenix, Arizona. my PC Techs Presents:

This week, I’ve heard complaints from a handful of people who are upset about the amount of spam they’ve been getting. And rightly so! There appears to be a new spam botnet on the scene that is sending out millions of pieces of spam with such zesty subject lines as “increase the size of your member” or “9 to 12 inches”. What a bunch of goofs :). When I told a guy that these people must be making a LOT of money, he didn’t believe me at first. But then I convinced him there’s a sucker born every minute, and he saw my point.

The bottom line: Most of these machines aren’t even tracked yet by RBLs such as Spamhaus. Too bad! Even searching the Completewhois Multi-RBL lookup doesn’t seem to be much help. Many of these machines are newly infected with trojans and it seems that the botnet creater waited until he had quite a large number of infected machines before launching his spam campaign. So far, I’ve counted 100 unique IP addresses to send SPAM and that’s just on ONE tiny internet email domain!

SPAM, the never ending battle. 🙁 If you’re getting hit with these, post a comment and let me know.

I’ve been doing a little research recently on tools that can convert a PDF into an ASCII file. I’ve got all of the old tricks like Ghostscript, Export from Acrobat, print to PS file, etc. The problem with most techniques is that a true ASCII file is never generated where the format of the file on import to an ASCII text program matches the original PDF file layout.

Here are some links to some tools or code libraries that look promising:

BCL Technologies
XpdfText
PDF2TXT
VeryPDF

This is fantastic news for anyone who:

A. Values low cost laptop and desktop purchasing options through Dell
B. Recognizes the superiority of AMD chips over Intel

Basically, me.

AMD chips have been excluded from the major manufacturers for far too long. Dell offers without a doubt the best laptop value for your money out of any of the major laptop shops. The past several years I’ve purchased dozens of Dell laptops, but every time I’ve felt a little ripped off because the option to explore AMD chips was never on the table.

Now that Dell is starting to sell AMD cpu’s, I think it’s more than likely that the next generation of Dell laptops and desktops will offer some models with AMD processors. It’s the right move to make. AMD has outdone Intel for the past 3 years in both price and performance. This move will bring over to Dell a whole new segment of customers who will only consider AMD products in their computers, never Intel. These customers number in the thousands.

This thread on google answers http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=569374 contains some very good information on the subject. A lot of people will recommend the AVG Free program. It’s good!

This of course comes on the heels of the Windows XP WMF vulnerability crisis. There still isn’t a patch out from Microsoft, and there won’t be for another week. Antivirus companies however (the good ones) had a signature for this problem out a week ago. http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/377

It goes to show that no matter how patched and safe you try to be with your computer, nothing beats a quality AV program that is updated daily.

I think that it’s time you learn how to secure your computers or hire a computer professional to do it for you, before the evil robots take over the world.: Click to read