Over the last couple of years a number of people have been caught out by "Renewal Notices" for Australian .com.au domain names being sent out. Some of our customers lost their .com.au domain names because they paid a "renewal notice". The company took the money but soon after cashing the cheque went belly up. The result was that the domain name was not renewed and it lapsed. The flow-on was that the client's website went off air.

Spam used to just a nuisance. A little bit of junk email here and there. Hit delete and forget it. Now it is turning into a major headache. Some spam contains viruses. A lot is just plain fraud. The fraud ranges from spam proporting to be from your bank asking you to click a fake link to supply your net banking login and password, to the Nigerian scams, to advertising products that have doubtful claims.

A US federal grand jury in Detroit on the 3rd of January, 2008, indicted 11 people over a wide ranging international fraud. The people included: several Americans, a Russian and a man with Canadian and Hong Kong citizenship. The fraud involved spamming, sending out millions of messages in a "pump and dump" scheme.

Internet Explorer 7 marks the first major update to Internet Explorer in several years. Explorer 6 has been a bane to us as a web developer. We've been forced to compromise a standards compliant design in order to accommodate an aging browser. IE7 marks some considerable improvements

First off is tabbed browsing. Here, Explorer is playing catch up to Firefox which in turn borrowed from the underrated browser, Opera.

The new IE gets a big tick for the zoom feature which allows users to zoom in on web pages. This is along overdue feature, if you ignore the fact Opera has had that feature for a while.

IE has also enhanced security considerably. Like the new Firefox, it warns of cross browser scripts.

IE 7 has improved it's adherence to web standards. It does a better job than IE6 which plagued designers with a annoyances like the peekaboo bug. IE7 renders this site properly- just like Firefox. However it is not quite there. See how IE handles pure CSS drop down menus at http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/menus/demo.html IE6 changes the colour when you hover a mouse over it. IE7 shows the menus, but it's a mirage; you can never get to the menus that expand out. Load the
same page in Firefox and you'll see how a pure CSS menu should work.

IE7 requires you to reboot your computer unlike Firefox. That suggests to us that IE7 is tied into the operating system. You won't get IE7 on a Mac or Linux like Firefox or Opera. IE7 still has a way to go to meet web standards but we think it a considerable improvement and a worthwhile upgrade, but we'll still recommend Firefox or Opera over it.

We recently received an email asking us to to update our Google AdWords. This is clearly a phishing scam that has nothing to do with Google. This makes a change from the regular banking or eBay ones we get.

The link says http://adwords.google.com/select/login while it really points to http://www.adwords.google.com.0lks.cn/select/Login. Note the extra bit in the URL.

Don't get caught out.

The message reads below.

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This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
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Dear Google AdWords Customer,
We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.
Please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your payment information.