Orbit Downloader suspiciously phones home. Spyware?

When you open orbit with all the automatic update and p2p network options disabled it still phones home with:

* your ip address
* a very long unique ID (guid) that could contain anything
* information about last use and last exit
* several other suspicious values: dltimes, ntdlgshowtimes, dlsuctipscnt and grabpro that probably relate to your orbit settings
* the version number you are using

Adobe Shockwave Plugin Privacy and Performance

Shockwave may send your passwords and personal data to its servers. It also probably still sends a list of the websites you visit to Adobe if you have “anonymous usage information” enabled by default.

Right click a Shockwave application running in your browser and you can disable the “anonymous usage information” and automatic updates. You can also delete SwHelper_*.exe to stop it loading and running in the background without and problems, although make a backup just in case.

Web Hosting Talk spammers

Web Hosting Talk provided my email address to HotScripts so they could send me their spam-like newsletter. The newsletter claims

“You are receiving this email because you signed up at HotScripts.com”

and also

“You have received this e-mail as you are a registered member of HotScripts.”

Both are false statements although they are both run by iNET Interactive.

It’s interesting they decided to do this months after I signed up for Web Hosting Talk without mentioning it in the email.

Thunderbird is unreliable and slow

Several weeks ago I decided to upgrade my mail client to Thunderbird because I assumed it would have more features and be an all round improvement on a very old version of Outlook Express. I was wrong.

You can create filters but quite frequently mail will sneak through even though it clearly matches a filter and is caught when you manually run a filter. The filters don’t have enough options either; if you want to delete a message before it’s downloaded, you have to set the mail account to “download headers only” which usually results in a load of blank messages that should have been deleted appearing in your inbox and stops new mail notifications appearing.

The order filters execute in is stupid too; instead of a sensible “stop executing more filters” option, all filters are run until a message is moved to a different folder!

Another irritating bug is when a message arrives but doesn’t appear in the list of messages. You know it’s there because the unread count next to the folder name is showing. To get it to show you have to either select “View: Unread” or search for it and doesn’t become visible in “View: All” even once it’s read or after the mail client is restarted!

Today Thunderbird crashed and when I opened it again and the inbox was rebuilt it showed thousands of spam messages from days ago that should have been completely deleted by my filters.

I am looking to switch to a new client.

‘On the Fiddle?’

‘On the Fiddle?’ was a BBC programme I watched yesterday. It’s great to know that there is a whole team of specialist investigators working to curb the suspected annual £10 million of payments to benefits cheats, probably at a cost of just less than £1 million/year.

One of their successes was managing to withdraw the £50/week payments of a Bosnian with knife injuries because his girlfriend spent too much time with him. It only took a couple of visits of asking intrusive questions, the hiring of a translator and a decision by some committee.

Another of the few cases they cleverly managed to extend into an hour long slot was that of a couple who had two houses but were claiming benefits. They had managed to extract £85,000 over a number of years. To catch them the fiddle fighters tailed them in a couple of cars full of investigators, presumably over a few days or maybe weeks.

They finally scored some damning evidence when they caught the male subject asking about the price of a house; clearly he must have a lot of money. This was enough to call the police, have them publicly arrested, search their house and confiscate anything. Unfortunately the benefit busters failed to find out if either of them had been working while claiming so their community service time was not increased.

What kept me hooked to the episode was the plight of a mother with a ‘disabled’ child. She was having to make do on regular benefits which only allowed her to live in a house with large garden while not working. This didn’t last long though thanks to the help of a dole detective who pointed out she could claim more. This allowed her to receive all her back-payments so she could finally buy a new car and go on holiday.

Interesting Google indexed flash results

Google has started extracting the text from flash files and is indexing the results. Here are a couple of interesting searches:

• “the password is”
• “password accepted”

WinSCP needs GUI improvement

WinSCP is a great open source tool but the Windows GUI for it isn’t threaded properly so it freezes while blocking operations take place. I’d love to get round to fixing this myself so hopefully this will serve as a reminder or encourage someone else to do it.

Spam experiment makes no sense

This article by the BBC is an advert for McAfee software disguised as tech news. I wonder how McAfee tricked them into this one. They even link directly to the McAfee site.

The story provides no information about what the actual test was. They were probably forced to use computers with windows update deliberately disabled running an unpatched version of windows from several years ago but still, the McAfee director has no authority to say “machines slowing down definitely means spyware”.

How would mearly “surfing the web” without spam filters result in any spam anyway unless you’re giving out your email address? The whole thing is ridiculous and should not be on a serious news website.

eBay buyer requirements

What you want:

block one buyer from buying all your items in one day before you have a chance to check

What you get:

block buyers who are currently winning or have bought 2 of my items in the last 10 days

What you want:

buyers who have not left feedback yet not to get annoyed when they are blocked from more listings

What you get:

buyers are clearly notified they’re now blocked and are free to leave negative feedback to tell you about it

eBay Developers Program is terrible

I can’t believe how bad the system is. Finding support on the forums is difficult and there are very few posts which is surprising for such a huge site. When a mod replies to a forum post it is almost always “submit a support request” which costs $75/hr. If that doesn’t show they have an interest in making the api as unreliable and badly documented as possible I don’t know what does.