Do you need a different DNS?

Several months ago, I tried to tell Wide Open West that they were having nameserver problems. The technician I spoke with told me that was impossible because WOW has no nameservers. That, of course, is nonsense. All ISPs run their own nameservers. When I reported the problem, I was having trouble connecting to websites. When I complained to WOW's corporate office, I was assured that the gentleman who claimed to be a "level 2 technician" was no such thing. In early November, I saw a similar problem. Websites just disappeared. Fortunately, I'd heard from Gary Freeland that week. Gary listened to Technology Corner when it was on WTVN and continues to listen now that we've expanded from local radio to worldwide coverage. He had written to ask about OpenDNS, so I thought I'd give the service a try. In a word, WOW! (And I don't mean Wide Open West.)

Let's start with a little background. The domain name system (DNS) stores and associates many types of information with domain names, but (according to a Wikipedia article) most importantly, it translates domain names (computer hostnames) to IP addresses. It also lists mail exchange servers accepting e-mail for each domain. In providing a worldwide keyword-based redirection service, DNS is an essential component of contemporary Internet use.

In other words, if I type "www.techbyter.com" in a Web browser's address line because I want to visit the Technology Corner website, the DNS server (nameserver) must translate "www.techbyter.com" to "70.96.188.38". The Internet doesn't understand words (www.techbyter.com) but it does understand IP addresses (70.96.188.38). Without the translation, you won't see the website.

Do you think you could remember 70.96.188.38 for very long? Probably not, but you can remember "TechByter.com", which is all the nameserver needs.

You might not want to depend on your ISP's DNS server (I'm not being redundant here: DNS is "domain name service", so adding "server" after "DNS" simply identifies the computer that is running the service.) Why might you want some DNS other than your ISP's? In the case of Wide Open West, the DNS server is apparently administered by fools. But even if your ISP manages the DNS server with aplomb, you might want to look elsewhere for speed.

Using OpenDNS seems to be modestly faster than using WOW's DNS even when it's working as expected. According to the operators, "OpenDNS runs a really big, smart cache, so every OpenDNS user benefits from the activities of the broader OpenDNS user base." Beyond that, "OpenDNS runs a high-performance network which is geographically distributed (see network map) and serviced by several redundant connections. OpenDNS responds to your query from the nearest location. That means we're very fast (and extremely reliable, to boot)." But there are other advantages to using OpenDNS:

• Safety: OpenDNS intercepts phishing attempts. OpenDNS customers will be warned if they attempt to visit a phishing site.
• Intelligence: OpenDNS fixes typos in the URLs you enter whenever possible. If you accidentally type "craigslist.og", OpenDNS will take you to "craigslist.org", which is probably what you intended.
• Cost: It's free. "OpenDNS makes money by offering clearly labeled advertisements alongside organic search results when the domain entered is not valid and not a typo we can fix. OpenDNS will provide additional services on top of its enhanced DNS service, and some of them may cost money. Speedy, reliable DNS will always be free."

There's no software to install, but you do have to tell your computer to send DNS requests to OpenDNS instead of to your (possibly brain-dead) ISP's DNS. If you have a router, you do that by modifying the DNS entries in the router. If you don't have a router, you'll change settings on your computer. OpenDNS explains what you need to do.

Is it perfect?

No. I wanted to visit a website that deals with backup procedures. Instead of seeing the website, I landed on the OpenDNS "problem" page. A quick test revealed that the problem was with OpenDNS and not with the site I was attempting to reach, so I sent a message to the OpenDNS tech support team. Although I received no response from OpenDNS, the problem was resolved within a few hours.

Overall: OpenDNS gets you where you want to go most of the time. (5 cats)

If you're using an ISP such as WideOpenWest that can't tell its nameserver from a hole in the ground, OpenDNS is essential. It's far more reliable than the DNS service my ISP provides. Even if your ISP provides a good, reliable nameserver, OpenDNS will probably be faster. It's easy to set up. It's fast. It's reliable. It's free. OpenDNS scores 5 cats. You can find out more here.

Truth in spamming

I rarely open spams, but when one comes from a self-professed "crook" I have to take a look. It was nothing more than a run-of-the-mill watch knock-off spam.

Proving once again that crooks aren't too bright, this one misspelled "your", "wait", "refund", and "shipping". I would have written "yourself" instead of "your self" but I was feeling charitable and didn't count that as a spelling error. Something else I found amusing is that the spammer in this case borrowed the "wagged.com" domain. In fact, that's what got my attention more than the "crook".

The wagged.com domain is owned by Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, one of the largest PR firms in the world. Microsoft uses Waggener Edstrom. The PR firm is, of course, not associated in any way with the spam.

On the trail

The domain westerr.com is registered to someone in Fayetteville, North Carolina, but it redirects to eonlinewatch.com, which is registered to someone in Garden Grove, California. How about trademark infringement? Do the RICO statutes apply here?

I've spent some time in New York City and in Midtown, particularly in the areas frequented by tourists, you'll find people selling watches that look a lot like the ones you see below on the eonlinewatch.com website. The difference is that the crooks in New York price their watches at $25.

Do you think that Rolex, Patek Philippe, Cartier, Breitling, and Omega approve of the "replica" (aka "counterfeit") watches? And what kind of fool would spend $10,000 on a watch, anyway? And what kind of fool would pay more than $200 for a counterfeit?

Deconstructing a Nigerian 419 scam

This time it was a BMW and £500,000 that I'd won. In less than a second I knew what the pitch would be, how the scam would work, and why I wouldn't be receiving either the money or the car. It's not that these things are so difficult to see through. The creatures who create them are crafty, but not very intelligent. It doesn't take more than casual observation to spot the tricks – and the mistakes.

Click the image at the right to see a full-size copy of the e-mail that claims to come from BMW in England.It says that "undisclosed recipients" have won both a car and about $966,000 (at the conversion rate on the day after Thanksgiving) as part of a BMW promotion in England.

Clue #1: "Undisclosed recipients". It's a grand prize. Only one person would win.

Clue #2: I am in the United States; a British promotion would be limited to those who reside in Great Britain.

And that's just the start. This arrived at just the right time (a slow day) so I thought I'd take it apart to point out the obvious problems.

THE INTERNATIONAL AWARENESS PROMOTION DEPARTMENT OF THE BMW AUTOMOBILE COMPANY. 22 Garden Close, Stamford, Lincs, PE9 2YP, London United Kingdom. Reference Number: BMW/2551256003/23 Ticket Number: 252101 Batch Number: BMWP/16UK/006		Chances are good that BMW knows enough not to create an e-mail that uses ALL CAPITAL LETTERS because nearly everyone today understands that capitals are equivalent to SHOUTING. I asked some acquaintances in London if the address made sense and all of them agreed that an address can't be in London if it is in Lincolnshire (Lincs), but makes sense if you take London out. Jon Elphick pointed out that "although it appears genuine, it does not exist. According to the Royal Mail website, the houses in Garden Close, Stamford only run from no.1 to no.19. If there were a no.22 the rest of the address, including the postcode, would be correct." A search on Google Maps for "22 Garden Close, Stamford, Lincs, PE9 2YP, London United Kingdom" turns up an entry for the "Heritage Lottery Fund". This may be the result of Googlebombing because the HLF is located at 7 Holbein Place, London, SW1W 8NR. I suspect that the postal codes PE9 and SW1W are not near each other. Additional searches reveal numerous reports of fraud and this link: As Brian Barker points out, "The telephone number equates to 070240 within the UK." He says it is not a Stamford geographical number, "indeed, not a geographical number at all. It is a personal number allocated to Magrathea Telecommunications Limited (this from www.ukphoneinfo.com). These are sometimes called follow-me numbers, I think, so you can see how this could actually be redirected to Nigeria."
Congratulations!!! The Board of Directors, members of staff and the International Awareness Promotion Department of the BMW Automobile Company, wishes to congratulate you on your success as the STAR PRIZE WINNER in this years'BMW Automobile International Awareness Promotion (IAP) held on Wednesday 22nd of November 2006, in London, England.		Except for people in middle school, few writers will end a sentence with 3 exclamation points. Most business writers will know that "this years'BMW" should be written as "this year's BMW" – the possessive of "year" is "year's" and there should be a space before BMW. Editor Kersti Wagstaff pointed out a grammatical error I missed: A UK business writer, even a bad one, would be unlikely to put a singular verb 'wishes' after a plural subject. She continues, "I might possibly wonder why the 'International Awareness Department of BMW' was using the American term 'automobile', guaranteed to raise average UK hackles, instead of 'car'. Or, indeed, why BMW doesn't have a dedicated 'British Awareness Department' - but once you start thinking at all, the whole email is blown anyway. Are you sure it wants deconstructing at this level?!" The writer does pick up some bonus points for using a believable date. The message arrived on November 24, 2 days after the supposed drawing.
The selection process was carried out through random selection in our Computerized Email Selection System (C.E.S.S.) from a database of over a million email addresses from the world wide web drawn from all the continents of the world.		If the drawing included "all continents of the world", I wonder how many entrants were were from Antarctica. Note to writer: Words ending in "ize" in US English usually end in "ise" in UK English, so I would expect "computerised" from a British writer. Or maybe not. Kersti Wagstaff again: Not very strong evidence - anything computer-related is liable to be seen with the US spelling here.
This makes you the proud owner of a brand new BMW 5 Series, M Sport Saloon car and a cash prize of £500,000.00GBP (Five Hundred Thousand Great British pounds). The car comes with a special BMW Insurance Cover for one whole year, that is, till the next promotion in 2007. It also comes with a one year warranty and FREE repairs at any BMW AUTOMOBILE depot or service station worldwide.		I suspect that even a middle-school British writer would know that one would use either the pound sign ( £) or "GBP", not both. That, however, turns out not to be the real problem. Wagstaff notes, "I might accept the use of both as a slip (even genuine UK sales pitches can be poorly literate - though not those from BMW) - but it would never occur to a Brit to gloss 'GBP' as 'Great British pounds'. If someone else did it, it would be greeted with roars of ironic laughter, once we got over the surprise - but we might still not make the connection with the GB in GBP.
YEAR: 2006 MODEL: 550i M Sport Saloon ENGINE SIZE: 4799cc with eight-cylinder V petrol engine and 4-valve technology. TRANSMISSION: automatic 6-speed gearbox and servotronic, powersteering. AUDIO AND COMMUNICATION: CD preparation for 6-disc CDchanger in glove box and an on-board computer. WHEELS: 18-inch M sports spoke alloy style 135M. INTERIOR: upholstery made of black Dakota leather and Advanced Automatic Air Conditioning Unit		I leave it up to you to find the errors here. Several exist.
For you to collect your prizes, kindly contact Barrister Walther Hawkman through email, stating your receipt of this notification. He has been mandated to offer you free legal assistance and facilitate the urgent delivery of your prizes directly to you. BARRISTER. WALTHER HAWKMAN. PHOENIX CHAMBERS, 503 HIGHTOWER ROAD WIMBLEDON SW23NE, LONDON, UK. EMAIL: barr_waltherhawk007@yahoo.co.uk Congratulations once more, and keep trusting BMW Automobile for top quality automobiles.		One would have to be a fool to believe that BMW (or any agency large enough to give away nearly $1 million and an expensive car) would use an attorney with a Yahoo e-mail address – particularly one that ends in "007" (James Bond) and includes "walther" (his gun). At the right is a photo (credit MGM/United Artists) of the Walther PPK James Bond carried until the mid 1980s. Do the criminals have a sense of humor or are they simply too dense to think of anything creative? Kirsti Wagstaff reminded me of an important distinction in British law that I had once heard, but had forgotten. Barristers don't do this kind of work: "Finally, no way would one ever be asked to apply to a barrister for something like this. Somebody has been looking 'lawyer' up in a dictionary and chosen the wrong option. For a start, members of the public do not approach barristers direct - barristers conduct court cases only, and get their 'instructions' for a court case from a solicitor, the lawyer who is employed by the member of the public. Barristers are extremely classy birds and would never have 'barr_xyz' as an email address - let alone a yahoo email address - this is lese majeste on the grand scale."
Engr. Chris Duncan DIRECTOR OF PROMOTIONS, INTERNATIONAL AWARENESS PROMOTIONS, BMW AUTOMOBILE. LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.		I do wish they'd stop SHOUTING. Oh – and doesn't British English drop the period if an abbreviation ends with the same letter as the full word. (Instead of "Mr." as we would use in US English, Brits write "Mr", so abbreviating "Engineer", which I've never seen as a title, would be "Engr", eh?) If you're a criminal, it's the little things you have to watch out for. By the way, only in Dilbert's dream world would an engineer be given the task of notifying the "unspecified recipients" that they had won a car. And a million dollars.
director_promo@bmw.com		The message claims to be from BMW in the UK, but shows "bmw.com" in the (forged) return address. BMW in the UK is bmw.co.uk.
The car I didn't win. And you didn't win, either. (This is the image you'll find on BMW's GB website: www.bmw.co.uk.)
Nigerians		These scams are called "Nigerian 419 scams" because they originated in Nigeria and they're covered by section 419 of the Nigerian penal code. That doesn't mean that all Nigerians are involved even though many of these scams continue to be run by expatriate Nigerians.
Thanks!		Special thanks to Jessica Feinstein, Jane Lyle, Kersti Wagstaff, Christine Shuttleworth, Marci Bethel, David Loeb, Brian Barker, John Richmond, Jon Elphick, Gordon Woolf, and Carrie Jadud. All provided useful information for this report.

Nerdly News

Electronic Frontier Foundation Can't Get No Satisfaction

The Copyright Office of the Library of Congress has reviewed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as they are required by Congress to do every 3 years. The stated goal of the review is to ensure that new technologies are recognized by the legislation. So far, the result seems to be to maintain the draconian aspects of the law while providing precious little relief for users. This year the Copyright Office granted 6 exemptions. "Unfortunately," says a news release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "all the proposed exemptions that would benefit consumers were denied."

The EFF had hoped for exemptions that would cover space-shifting, region coding, and backing up DVDs. As you no doubt know, consumers cannot legally purchase a DVD and make a backup copy for their own use.

The Copyright Office's 6 new exemptions: Persons making noninfringing uses of the following six classes of works will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)) during the next three years.

1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.
2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
3. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.
5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.
6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.

The EFF says "it's good that film professors, archivists, cell phone recyclers, and security researchers were able to successfully navigate the exemption process, it appears that digital consumers still have no choice but to get Congress to amend the DMCA." The organization says that its members look forward to Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) reintroducing his DMCA reform bill, H.R. 1201, in the new Congress next year.

More free stuff from Google

Now Google says your cell phone should be free, but we all know there's no such thing as a free cell phone just as there is no such thing as free radio and television. They are supported by advertising. Radio stations guarantee advertisers a certain number of ears. TV stations guarantee a certain number of eyes. That's Google's plan with the "free" cell phones.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says people will spend as much as 10 hours per day interacting with mobile phones of the future, which will also do many of the things today's computers do. Allowing your phone to display targeted advertising — ads for products and services you already use or are likely to — would pay for the service.

Google already has a lot of that data. The company knows a lot about most computer users and it uses the information to provide services for users. What if you could export your Web search history? Maybe you'd like to download your Google e-mail archives. According to Schmids, the company is working on what is essentially the equivalent of number portability, the government-mandated program that allows consumers to switch a telephone number from one provider to another.

Schmidt says the relationship between phone numbers and personal data is clear. The government says the phone number belongs to you, not to the telephone company. Likewise, "data should never be held hostage."

As for free phones, that's actually a misnomer. The service would be free, but you would probably still have to pay for the phone. Schmidt compared cell phones to newspapers, which aren't free but cost far less than they would cost if advertisers didn't pay a large chunk of the cost.

Annoying legal disclaimer

My attorney says I really need to say this: The TechByter website is for informational purposes only. I assume no responsibility for its accuracy, although I do my best. The information is subject to change without notice. Any actions you take based on information from the radio program, the podcast, or from this website are entirely at your own risk. Products and services are mentioned for informational purposes only and their various trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners. TechByter cannot provide technical support for products or services mentioned.