Multiple clients of have contacted us recently after receiving an invoice from a company by the name of “DNS Services” (dnssvc.com). The fake invoice is for the amount of $65 for an annual fee for ‘Managed DNS Backup Business Services’.

A picture of the fake invoice is below. Recipients of this invoice will notice near the bottom if they read it carefully, “This is a solicitation for the order of goods or services, or both, and not a bill, invoice or statement of account due. You are under no obligation to make any payments on account of this offer unless you accept this offer.”

If you are truly interested in managed DNS redundancy, Monroe Tech can help through service recommendation, or full setup. A company that uses these tactics to drum up business is probably not providing you with the best service available.

You can find more information via google search here.

Check out “Classic Shell” here. It’s free and cake to install. It’ll give you that “classic” Start Menu you’ve used for years.

Once you buy your own modem, you will need to carry your old modem and the new one down to Time Warner’s office. They will need to register the serial number of your new device in their system. Save $4 per month!

If you still use Ad-Aware, it would probably be wise to switch at this time.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/11/lavasoft_has_new_owners/

Hi, I have a Sony Vaio laptop. I turned it on and now it reads, “Operating system not found.”. Is it a hardware problem, or could it be something else? The laptop is two years old. Thank you.

Hi John,

When a problem like this happens, I usually ask the customer about events that occurred before the message happens. Have there been any major or minor problems occurring in the last week before it occurred?

The problem indicates a likelihood that the boot sector is missing or corrupt. When a PC boots, it looks for specific data located on the beginning of the hard drive, called the boot sector. The boot sector tells the computer how the hard disk is setup and where it can jump to on the drive to load the next part of the operating system. This message indicates that the PC cannot see the boot sector, either because (a) the hard drive is not “seen” by the system, (b) the hard drive is not accessible by the system, (c) the boot sector data is missing, or (d) the boot sector data is corrupt.

This error can be caused by hardware, and many times it is. The first thing we would do is test the hard drive with diagnostic software. However, it can also be caused by a virus, a failed Windows update, virus scanning software malfunctioning, installing a Windows upgrade incorrectly, or a number of other things. If you email me with more information about what has been going on, I’d be happy to try to nail it down a little closer.

If you were to bring this machine into the shop, your rate would be $39.99 for diagnostics with a 2-3 day diagnostic turnaround time. We would tell you exactly what is causing the problem and quote and parts/labor needed in addition to fix the problem. In some cases it means a new hard drive but in the case of software problems it can be as little as a half hour of labor additional.

More than 50 percent of Android devices have serious vulnerabilities that are unpatched because carriers are often slow to update the software, a mobile security researcher says.
“Since we launched X-Ray [Android app used for scanning for vulnerabilities], we’ve already collected results from over 20,000 Android devices worldwide. Based on these initial results, we estimate that over half of Android devices worldwide have unpatched vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a malicious app or adversary,” Jon Oberheide, chief technology officer at Duo Security, wrote in a blog post. The results are then extrapolated using Google’s published data on Android versions, he said.
Oberheide, who will be presenting the full details of his research on Friday at the United Summit conference in San Francisco, says the vulnerabilities detected by X-Ray are serious. “That is, if the user has installed a malicious app or an attacker has gained code execution via a browser exploit, these vulnerabilities allow for privilege escalation and full control of the device,” he wrote in an e-mail.
The vulnerabilities can remain on devices for months or even years because carriers are “very conservative” in rolling out patches to fix bugs in Android, mostly because it is expensive to develop, test and deploy an update, according to Oberheide.
“When you think of all the possible handsets they have, and all the various software configurations and customizations, you can imagine the extensive testing that must be done even with the slightest change to the software. Carriers are also very conservative because, if they do screw up and end up bricking a couple million users’ devices with a poorly tested update, they’ll take a significant financial hit from their user population fleeing to other carriers,” he wrote.
In addition, carriers don’t have much incentive to patch and keep devices up to date; there is no liability if user devices are compromised as a result of unpatched holes, he said. Carriers “would much prefer to put effort towards the latest and greatest devices that users will shell out more money for, instead of sinking money into existing devices,” he said.
When asked to comment on these allegations and the report results, an AT&T spokesperson provided this statement: “Patches must be integrated and tested for different platforms to ensure the best possible user experience. Therefore, distribution varies by manufacturer and device.”
“Security updates are a top priority and treated with the utmost urgency,” a Sprint spokesman said in a statement. “We would never knowingly withhold or prevent release of a software update containing a security patch. Sprint delivers security updates as they are made available.”
Representatives from Verizon and T-Mobile said they were looking into the matter. We will provide an update when they respond. A Google spokeswoman said the company had no comment.
Tim Wyatt, principal engineer at mobile security provider Lookout, cautioned against reading too much into the numbers. “While 50 percent sounds bad, it’s substantially better than when we studied the prevalence of vulnerable devices in 2011,” he said in an e-mail. “One caution around the study is that there are not indicators in this study that patch cycles have actually improved from last year, as more vulnerable devices could be just ‘aging out’ and being replaced with new devices that are shipped without these vulnerabilities.”
Meanwhile, “Apple largely avoids this issue by controlling the full mobile stack,” making a comparison between the platforms tricky, Wyatt said.

The traditional security method, even when linked to different verification methods, remains an exploit that cybercriminals can pursue. Connectivity online often means that users will keep to the same password, or similar variants — and once one account is breached, that information can be used to tap into financial information, online payment systems, or sensitive work documents.
But if Intel’s prototype “Client-Based Authentication Technology” is successful, biometrics may be the latest defense against cyberattacks.

Intel researcher Sridhar Iyendar demonstrated the technology at Intel’s Developer Forum this week. Waving a hand in front of a “palm vein” detector on a computer, one of Iyendar’s assistants was logged into Windows 7, was able to view his bank account, and then once he moved away the computer locked Windows and went into sleeping mode.

The biometric sensors used on the laptop detect the unique vein patterns on a palm, which is of course far more difficult to forge than a password made up of “12345″ or “qwerty”, Lyendar said:
“The problem with passwords — we use too many of them, their rules are complex, and they differ for different websites. There is a way out of it, and biometrics is an option.”

The researcher said that once the device has recognized a user, that identity tag can be forwarded to any number of accounts securely; from banks to social networks, e-mail or business networks. This would mean individual websites would no longer need to support password networks if the tech becomes widespread.

The palm-reading technology needs new software and sensors to be build into consumer laptops, but there’s no need for a new kind of chip — so biometrics may be on the shelves sooner than you think.

Biometrics may not be to everyone’s taste, and the technology still needs work — as airport officials in the U.K. found to their chagrin. Iris scanners were bought in to airports, costing 9 million pounds ($14.5 million), but were already out of date by the time the machines were installed. In addition, the tech was found to be less accurate than governments believed it would be.

However, new methods of security have to be found if account breaches and networks are not going to remain the playground of hackers. There’s a reason why so many passwords include easy to remember number codes or word sequences, and the same password is used across multiple accounts — the general public need an easy way to secure their data. Asking people to remember multiple patterns rarely works. Whether we like it or not, a swipe of the hand may be the answer.

Credit: cnet

So when we where asked by the Parma Christian Fellowship Church to help out at their  Centro Educativo Verdad y Vida de Honduras school in Morazán, Yoro, Honduras we stepped up. The church was in the process of building a computer lab for the children at the school, and was in need of computers for each child. We where able to send down enough laptops for the school children to help with their development.

Fresh from their latest mission trip, Pastor Myke Merrill sent us a picture of the computer room and said the kids are doing amazing with their new technology.

We’ll assume Windows 7 takes 30GB of your disk space. If you save at the highest setting and you have a 250GB hard disk then you can store roughly 26,000 images on your PC.

(220,000,000,000 bytes / 8,192,000 bytes)

At the 3MB per image setting you’ll have room for 70,000 or more.

As a reminder, the upgrade to Windows 8 on an existing Windows computer will cost just $40, though buying an upgrade DVD will cost $70. However, since the biggest benefits of Windows 8 are in the touch interface, your better bet is to buy a system — like the Surface tablet — that’ll let you get digital (and by that I mean, “busy with your fingers”).

Credit: msn.com