New Form of Scam / Spam?

Found in my junk mail folder today. Now the name and domain details are correct, it was only registered yesterday but using scare tactics to avoid late fees is just pure drivel. There are no late fees and those search engines do not ask for fees. It is a scam. the link that says searchregistry.org actually goes to genusk . com.

I searched on the web and found this site that reckons it’s a scam: http://www.scamadviser.com/check-website/genusk.com. Now apparently 6,648 recommend it on Google+, which for a site that was only created on August 28th 2014 make’s it highly unbelievable!

Just avoid!

Hi there David Bolton, 

Domain Name: electricemporium.com  (Account #64232) This email is being sent out to you because search registration for electricemporium.com is pending.
Please register these domains to search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo ASAP to avoid late fees.

Registering for search engines would help you show up in search results and increase your online presence.

You can register your domain at: here ( actually goes to genusk . com ) 

We sincerely appreciate your business! If you require anything, we are at your service.

Remember… If you do not register your domain with the search engines, it may not appear in the search engine listing when people are looking for you. Failure to complete your domain name search engine registration by the expiration date may make it difficult for your customers to locate you on the web. Complete your search engine registration today at: www.searchregistry.org (actually goes to genusk . com )
Sincerely, 

Search Engine Registry
1787 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Suite 1025
Washington DC, 20006

“Your sites have been hacked” Google told me; they were wrong!

I received this email from Google for six websites, including this one dhbolton.com

Dear site owner or webmaster of budgetseo.org,

We recently discovered that some pages on your site look like a possible phishing attack, in which users are encouraged to give up sensitive information such as login credentials or banking information. We have removed the suspicious URLs from Google.com search results and have begun showing a warning page to users who visit these URLs in certain browsers that receive anti-phishing data from Google.

Below are one or more example URLs on your site which may be part of a phishing attack:

http://www.budgetseo .org/images/stories/2013/www.bb.com.br/login.do2560.html

Here is a link to a sample warning page:
http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http%3A//www.budgetseo.org/images/stories/2013/www.bb.com.br/login.do2560.html

We strongly encourage you to investigate this immediately to protect users who are being directed to a suspected phishing attack being hosted on your web site. Although some sites intentionally host such attacks, in many cases the webmaster is unaware because:

1) the site was compromised
2) the site doesn’t monitor for malicious user-contributed content

If your site was compromised, it’s important to not only remove the content involved in the phishing attack, but to also identify and fix the vulnerability that enabled such content to be placed on your site. We suggest contacting your hosting provider if you are unsure of how to proceed.

Once you’ve secured your site, and removed the content involved in the suspected phishing attack, or if you believe we have made an error and this is not actually a phishing attack, you can request that the warning be removed by visiting 
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/?tpl=emailer
and reporting an “incorrect forgery alert.” We will review this request and take the appropriate actions.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Note: if you have an account in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can verify the authenticity of this message by logging into https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverviewand going to the Message Center, where a warning will appear shortly.

Sure enough it appeared in Google Webmaster tools so the warnings were correct. All had the same url shown here with example.com.

example.com//images/stories/2013/www.bb.com.br/login.do2560.html

I checked the files and folders. No hacks. I reported it to my hosting provider; the excellent spiralhosting.co.uk and they confirmed that no hacking had taken place.

So where did the weird urls come from? And is this a way to get Google to knock your site offline for a few days. Very odd!

It’s ok Google, I think your Webmaster tools and Analytics are still sublime. You do a truly great job and a false alarm or six does not make me lose confidence in you..

Storms? Nah just windy – oh wait…

Some of the local shops on Francis road in Leyton (E10) are getting spruced up and have two storey high scaffolding, now reduced to half storey road blocks. Well it makes a change from speed bumps and pot holes…

Photo was shown on BBC.

Francis road storm damage...

And some more I took:

Storm Damage October 2013

Storm Damage October 2013

Storm Damage October 2013

Storm Damage October 2013

Oh the Irony!

BoingBoing is one of my favourite websites but occasionally things go a little awry.

A story there today about some 8 year old girl objecting to a series of books for girls and books for boys. I got the sense that she was unhappy with the girls book because of it’s angle that girls didn’t like things like camping trips.

BoingBoing has adverts and the one immediately above the story .. well judge for yourself! The advert says “MALE GAMERS ONLY”. I’m sure girls really love this! </sarcasm>

irony

Founding a new business!

In December I setup a SEO (search engine optimization service) called Budgetseo.org with the aim of getting websites found on google for a phrase, significantly cheaper than other seo services.

Of course, being a SEO site, getting found is just as important for my business website, so I had to do my magic on my own site (known as “Eating your own doig food”) for the phrase budget seo (clicking this will take you to that search in google.com), it’s on the first page results out of nearly 70 million. Result!

Corporate settings and link shorteners

I work for a large organisation that is a bit paranoid about its network. We have internet but it’s pre-screened by Websense and many sites are blocked including links via url shorteners such as bit.ly and wired.com context.ly. Now when even Microsoft.com is using url shorteners, it’s going to diminish teh usefullness of

Having trouble upgrading your Nuget Package Manager? If you get the error described in Microsoft’s explanation, their advice isn’t enough. After uninstalling it from the control panel, it is still present (yup!) and still won’t let you upgrade. “Zombie like it still exerts a malign influence even after death…”

Here’s what you need Close down Visual Studio. Look for C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0Common7IDEExtensionsMicrosoft CorporationNuGet Package Manager
and you’ll see the folder for the older Nuget version; something like 1.5.20902.9026. Just delete it. Now you can upgrade. Simples!

I need a new word! So here is aptoblique

In boardgames the phrase horizontally or vertically but not diagonally crops up frequently. As in “these pieces can move” or the “squares are connected. “, so I’ve taken the latin for connected asnd sideways aptus and oblique, portmanteau’d them and shortened them to aptoblique. So if two pieces can move aptobliquely they can move horizontally or vertically but not diagonally.

Has My PC A Virus?

spoolsvI’ve seen this before (the Spoolerservice has eaten 2 1/4GB of ram) and it’s easily fixed by switching to Services tab and stopping then starting Spooler.

This only happens after I’ve printed something a few hours earlier. I’m running Microsoft Security Essentials and it’s uptodate.

On the other hand it may be just a faulty driver for Windows 7 for my HP Laserjet 1018 with a pernicious time bomb memory leak. If you do know, please tell!

It appears to be just a bug in the printer driver. I keep the service set to manual and that sorts it. Strange bug though!

Out with the old

So it’s bye bye to Portent.org, my five year old blog on interesting things. I’m not sure what will happen as I’ve sold it, the domain name and the twitter hashtag.

New in is fiction writing, an experimental fiction writing site for me to play and practise and gratis which is about free things. Software currently but this will probably change.