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.

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.

We've been testing some of the new crop of web browsers lately. The results seem to be point one way... Firefox.

In case you haven't heard, Firefox is a stand alone web brower that is part of the Mozilla stable. It has a number of advantages over the dominant Internet Explorer:

1. Cross Platform: Firefox come in various flavours adapted for variou operating systems.
2. Small Download: The Windows version is about 4.7meg which is almost a 10th of the size of Internet Explorer 6. The Linux and OSX versions are larger, weighing in at 8.1meg and 8.6meg respectively
3. Speed: Firefox seems to load web pages faster than Explorer.
4. Tabbed Browsing: One of our favourite features is tabbed browsing. It's nice and easy having various windows all open in the same place. You can have multiple pages open without cluttering your desktop.
5. Popup Blocking: One of the most annoying features of surfing the web thes days would have to be popups. Explore can block popups with 3rd party software but Firefox has a popup blocking feature as a standard.
6. Security: Firefox doesn't run ActiveX commands so you are less likely to be plagued by spyware
7. User Selected Stylesheets: If a website has multiple style sheets, Firefox enables you to swap easily by clicking an icon in the bottom left.
8. Standards Support: Firefox fully supports all the latest web standard like XHTML, Cascading stylesheets etc. It's wont chuck a "hissy fi"t if it comes across an XML page.
9. Easy Switching: Firefox can easily import your favourites from Explorer.
10. Free: Yes, Firefox is free. It costs nothing and is based on open source.

At present, Explorer seems to be falling further behind. Explorer 6 is now around 2 years old which is a long time in internet years. Firefox offers some very stiff competition and some compelling reasons to switch.

The Melton South Community Centre did have a free website which was put together as part of the Federal government's “Work for the Dole Program”. The site was not particularly up-to-date and had a few other problems. It was time for an overhaul. Drupal came to the rescue.

In a historic move, AOL has announced the end of the line for Netscape. Support for the browser will cease from the 1st of Feb, 2008.