The “European City Guide” was supposedly shut down in 2003 by the Office of Fair Trading for misleading advertising.

In the post today, I received an unsolicited scam order form from the “European City Guide” asking for confirmation of my company’s details, which of course had a slight error. In the small print was the little line:

Please return this document with a signature in the appropriate box if you would like to place an order

The European City Guide form is laid out so it might appear that you are actually signing that the corrections are valid, not with the expectation that you will be ordering two successive copies of their “European City Guide” at €987 each, nor that you are signing a continuous re-order, which needs 3 months notice to cancel.
There is a web site called “Stop the European City Guide” and Richard Corbbet, a Yorkshire MEP has written extensively about this, and similar practices.
Richard Corbbet’s Blog suggests that several other scam organisations also have the same owner.

• UK Internet Register
• Construct Data
• Novachannel AG

The European City Guide’s web site has a code of conduct document that states:

In accordance with the legislation governing DISTANCE SALES, our
forms incorporate a coupon for termination of the contract, which is located on the
client’s copy of the form. If the client returns this completed, stamped and signed
coupon to us within the mentioned cooling-off period this will result in automatic
cancellation.

Strangely, the form which they sent to Dragon Thoughts, seems to be missing this cancellation coupon.
I wonder if it might be a printing error?

I received a deceptive notice yesterday from Domain Registry of America (DRoA).

It made me so angry that I had to write this post about DRoA. The notice came by snail mail in an envelope with my correct name and address and included a return envelope for payment, although they expecte me to pay the postsage for their scam.

The notice looks like a bill and was written to scare me into changing my domain name registry: “You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights to it on the Web, and now is the time to transfer and renew your name from your current Registrar to the Domain Registry of America. Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identify…”

The newest edition of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser is due to be released on the 17^th of June 2008.

It promises dramatic improvements in speed, performance and memory usage.

New features are set to include:

• Enhanced security
  • - even safer to use than before and even further ahead of Internet Explorer
  • Additional anti-virus integration
  • Integration with Windows Vista Parental controls
• Easier to Use
  • Full page zoom of text and graphics - This was a feature that distinguished Opera
  • Better Integration with Windows and Apple Macintosh
  • Resumable downloads - no need to restart a large download because of a glitch in your connection.

As should befit the dragon thoughts blog on dragonthoughts.com, a few new pieces of dragon related content have be compiled together as “dragon content“.

I was called today by somebody who gave their web address as w*w.resortvacationsvip.com which is a travel company with no links to enabling booking. I wonder how they could get any legitimate business.
They claimed I was being offered a free holiday from a competition that I or a member of my household had entered.

They couldn’t tell me which competition I had won, but did tell me it was only open to Visa card and Mastercard holder. - I pointed out that this would apply to over 98% of the adult UK population.

They had my correct name and address.

The scammer had a heavy, possibly Indian or Chinese accent.

When I confirmed that I did own appropriate credit cards, they tried to extract my credit card details - when I refused on the basis that this was probably a scam, they kept trying to get my credit card number out of me, assuring me that it was OK - apparently they’re FCCA registered, and because of that the details couldn’t be misused. - I countered that in fact, as my cards are issued on the UK and therefore FSA regulated and that f I was stupid enough to give it to cold callers, they could attempt to misuse it with a card not present transaction.
When I kept asking why they needed the credit card details, at first I was told that it was so that they could verify that I was a credit card holder. I pointed out that they called me so I was the person that needed to verify their credentials. Then he switched tack, and said that the would need my credit card details for a registration fee of around £250. I questioned this, pointing out that I had been offered a completely free holiday competition prize. He said “Nothing is free“.

They gave me a “Toll-free” number that I could call them back on. I pointed out that a phone number in the USA is not toll-free when called from the UK - It is an international call.

When I asked for their FCCA registration number, the caller evaded answering.
I kept leading him on for a while, to keep him from trying to scam others, and to research his web site and comments about the scam company. One particularly enlightening one was on 800notes.com

I asked him if he had heard of Perfect Travel Promotions Orlando - Which appears as the title on w*w.resortvacationsvip.com and has an identical web site at w*w.ptporlando.com. He claimed he hadn’t heard of PTP Orlando. They have the same phone number (1-877-727-7605) and email addresses of CustomerService@PTPorlando.com and sales@PTPorlando.com

When I kept asking him the name of the company he was working for he refused to give it then finally hung up.

In short, it had to be scam. What legitimate company employee would not know their own company’s name?

If you have similar experiences, or wish to comment on this, please do so.

Having seen that Sony Ericsson have updated their PC-Suite for communicating with Sony-Ericsson mobile phones, such as my S500i, I looked in vain for an update option on the software. I feel that failing to implement direct updates is a poor practice from a company that claims to be in the forefront of technology.

Since there was none I had to go direct to the Sony Ericsson web site to download the newest update of the suite.

The instructions warn that you should (manually) unsinstall the older version of their PC-Suite. What they don’t tell you is that the uninstallation takes around 20 minutes on a 2.4 GHz Quad core PC running Windows Vista.

Then, it requires a reboot….

Installing version 3 of the PC-Suite seems interminable as it sits on a screen explaining that the drivers are being installed. It actually took around 35 minutes to install, and this time was capable of installation with Firefox as the default web browser.

Version 3 of Sony Ericsson’s PC-Suite does seem somewhat better than version 2.
It allows direct editing of the phone contents, such as the address book. It also recognises the Windows Vista Contacts and Windows Calender as legitimate sources of data for synchronisation. It does not however realise that bookmarks could be synchronised from Mozilla Firefox.

it is a definite improvement on version 2, as long as you have a spare hour or so for the installation process.

A customer of mine recently received the following spam…

Amazingly, considering that they promise worldwide search engine optimization, Dr. Marc Schneider and his company Global Vibration Inc., can only be found as being mentioned on sites relating to spamming.

I am Dr. Marc Schneider and I work for Global Vibration Inc. in Washington DC ( Tel: 1 202-787-3989 ) - I would like to speak with the person in charge of your international clientele. Who is my contact? Who should I speak to??

In fact, after visiting http://www.myclients.web.site.co.uk, I have noticed that your website cannot be found on foreign search engines (I tested it on Hispanic search engines, German search engines, Asian search engines, etc.) Our company is specialized in multilingual search engine promotions in 28 languages . From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, we can show you how to develop a true international online presence by promoting your website on foreign search engines.

Let us show you how to develop a presence on the multilingual web without having to translate your website: It is not necessary to translate your website in order to submit to foreign search engines, however, you need to have at least 1 page in Japanese optimized with Japanese keywords and meta tags in order to submit to Japanese search engines, at least 1 page in Spanish optimized with Spanish keywords in order to submit to Hispanic search engines and so on…

I strongly suggest that you watch our online presentation which will explains clearly how to get top rankings on foreign search engines with only 1 entry page per language (click on the following link or copy-paste it into your web browser): http://www.mplw.net/demo

From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, get users to find your website when searching with YOUR KEYWORDS in their Native language.

Please call me at 1 (202)-787-3989 or email me and let’s work on giving your website the true international exposure which it deserves to have with foreign native online users!!

Regards,

Marc Schneider, Ph.D.
Marcs@mplw.net
_____________________

GLOBAL VIBRATION INC.
1250 Connecticut Ave N.W. Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036 USA
TEL:1 (202)-787-3989 - FAX: 1 (202)-318-4779
http://www.mplw.net :
Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services since 1999.

They don’t seem to have a presence at all on Japanese google.

They claim to have been doing Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services (SEO) since 1999, but a whois query of their domain mplw.net shows a creation date of 04 Aug 2007 16:13:29

Many other companies are receiving the same spam for example, see http://www.tmcowners.com

For such a multi-nationally aware company, sending spam to the UK, Global Vibration Inc. haven’t even been capable of putting their own phone number in the standard international format, presumably because they are not aware that anyone outside the USA has to dial in international number to reach them.

Associated with their domains are the following administrative email addresses

• urls@mseo.com
• mauispirit@gmail.com

Sometimes, it’s useful to get an idea of your actual, rather than quoted broadband speed. This is a simple tool that can give your broadband a quick check.

It was wonderful to see that Microsoft have finally realized that the lack of standards compliance in their web browser is actually holding back the internet. Regrettably, they still seem to have a long way to go.

In the Microsoft Developer Network Blog Chris Wilson, an IE Platform Architect, writes that IE 8 will have an extra mode where it actually complies with the World Wide Web Consortium standards.

Unfortunately, the IE8 team have decided that the best way to comply with web standards is for all authors to add their own non-standard meta tag to indicate that the content is compliant, otherwise they intend the product to render content in their own irregular way.

Full marks to Microsoft for finally realizing that standards are essential, but probably the solution to backward compatibility deserves a D-.

A better solution would have been to render pages that are served to IE8 in the new “super standards” mode, and to render broken, or IE5, IE6, or IE7 specific pages in a compatibility mode, whilst displaying a message warning users that the page is flawed. This would encourage web developers to comply with web standards and would reduce the risks from malware that relies on quirks in rendering of malformed HTML.

In Java, it is necessary to put a letter “L” after a numeric constant when it of type long.
Although Java permits a lower case “L” it is better to consistently use an upper case “L”, as the lowercase “L” can be easily confused with a numeric 1, when reading code.
For example, both variables x and y, are assigned the same value here, but can easily be read as having different values.

long x=10l; //watch out, this has a lower case "L" not a numeric 1 at the end.
long y=10L;


Wordpress have recently released a security update for their blogging software.

The security updates have been downloaded from http://wordpress.org/download/ and installed.

Wordpress makes the upgrades trivially easy, as long as you have direct ftp access to the server.

Having spent the last day and a bit re-installing software on my Dell Inspiron 530, I was disappointed to find that the “Send To” option in Micorsoft Office 2007 was greying out “email recipient”, despite having a fully working Copy of Mozilla Thunderbird to communicate with.

I assume this is an error in the installation, rather than a protectionist measure by Micorsoft, although it may be there to encourage people to install Microsoft Outlook, or use the Microsoft mail client that is built into Vista, as a replacement for Microsoft Outlook Express.

There is a fix, but it does require a registry edit that worked for me on Micorsoft Windows Vista Premium. It will probaqbly work on other versions of windows.

You should only attempt this if you are happy editing your windows registry with Regedit and understand that there are terrible consequences if you make some errors.

1. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Messaging Subsystem
   Locate the following registry values. Typically, these values are listed in the Windows Messaging Subsystem key.
   
Name Type Data
MAPI REG_SZ 1
CMC REG_SZ 1
CMCDLLNAME REG_SZ Mapi.dll
CMCDLLNAME32 REG_SZ Mapi32.dll
MAPIX REG_SZ 1
MAPIXVER REG_SZ 1.0.0.1
OLEMessaging REG_SZ 1

2. If any of these registry values are missing, follow these steps to add the values:
   1. Click the Windows Messaging Subsystem subkey, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click String Value.
   2. Type the name of the missing value, and then press ENTER.
   3. Click the new value, and then click Modify on the Edit menu.
   4. In the Edit String dialog box, type the correct value for the missing string value in the Value data box.
   5. Repeat steps a - d for each value that is missing from the table that is in step 1.
3. On the File menu, click Exit

Finally, when you restart your Micorsoft Office 2007 application, the “send” option on the file menu will include “Email” as a functional option and Microsoft Word or Excell will be happy to send documents as attachments using Mozilla Thunderbird, or some other Email client.