Tech News Vermont

A county in Kentucky gets robbed by computer criminals who used software to trick county computers into transferring funds into money mole bank accounts.  Those moles were people who thought they were working for a legitimate business, but later found out that they’d been scammed.

Make sure you check out any company that offers to hire you over the Internet via email, solely based on your on-line resume.  Always know who you are dealing with if you are asked to send non-reversible financial instruments (i.e.money orders) to someone.

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A short episode this week, running through some of the tech news from last week.  There was a major outage around Washington and Rutland counties due to a fiber line that was blasted by a shotgun.   Fairpoint may go into bankruptcy, but not to worry there are alternative ISPs in Vermont and Fairpoint won’t just shrivel up and blow away, they’ll be provide service while they restructure.

Gov Douglas has said that there is stimulus money flowing into Vermont to help expand our broadband connectivity.  That’s great news.

Have a great 4th!

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Send ideas for the poll question to [email protected].

For people interested in the Commodore 64.  I’d recommend the wikipedia entry as a great starting place to find out all about one of the first truly mass market personal computers.

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The first few days with the iPhone 3.0 software has been fairly good.  I lost my contacts and calendars when I tried to turn on Push, but I restored them from backup.  I still don’t fully understand the relationship between the Mac applications, .mac (or as it’s know now-a-days MobileMe *ick*) and the iPhone.

I mentioned the Wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/  It’s a great place to go for a trip down memory lane on the Internet.

Gibson Research is in the blog roll and I’d encourage anyone with a Windows XP computer to look in your Firefox extensions for the .NET extension.  There is a way to remove it (even though the uninstall button is greyed out.)  Here’s a a great How to Remove article: How To Remove Microsoft .NET Spyware Extension

Don’t forget that you too can be part of the show, just click the About button and use one of those methods to send me information for a subsequent show.

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I didn’t change the episode tag at the front of the podcast, I know it says episode 4 then after the music I start into episode 5…. Sorry for the confusion, this is really episode five.

Don’t forget to check out www.vtsda.org.  The Vermont Software Developers Alliance is hosting a lunch and learn on the 17th.

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After a long break the podcasts are back.  I received an email from Verizon about some comments that were posted on the Concord Monitor’s web site.  I cover some of the hightlights from E3 and talk about the troubles with Conficker seen in certain hospitals.  Short show this week, working on getting back into a regular groove.

I talk about how the iPhone handled being used as a GPS on my road trip.  Some more Fairpoint information about the transition from Verizon.  Good luck to the Green Team, team 885 at the Granite State Regional.  Check out http://www.baesystemsfirst.org/regional/ or http://www.thebluealliance.net/ For a taste of what the Lego League is all about, check out http://maplelegostars.tripod.com/

For the security corner, we talked about the $250k bounty on the table from Microsoft to find, arrest, and convict the author(s) of Downadup.

In addition to talking about the past weeks blog posts, I cover my Fairpoint service call.  I’m part of the 28,000 people that WCAX is talking about in this news story http://www.wcax.com/global/story.asp?s=9793260  For the security corner we talk about how to prevent having your credit card compromised and I introduced the FIRST organization, check them out at http://www.usfirst.org/

Episode one is a quick introduction to the podcast, the podcaster, and a survey of the iPhone mania that swept Vermont this month.  The purpose of technewsvt.com is to talk about tech in Vermont.  The best place to get Vermont iPhone news is at radmacdaddy’s blog http://iphonevt.wordpress.com/

In the security corner I talked about Downadup and you can read all about this malicious program at http://blogs.technet.com/mmpc/archive/2009/01/22/centralized-information-about-the-conficker-worm.aspx

 

If you want to contribute to the show please click the Contact button on the blog and find out how to send in material for the show.  If you have or have used Amazon’s Kindle in Vermont I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for listening