I was notified back in October that, as a Windows 7 Launch Party host, I had been automatically entered into a contest and had won a free Dell laptop. I was wary of the initial notification since I get scam email all the time, but after checking with my MVP lead and discovering that it was legit, I was curious to see what I’d won. Well, it was finally delivered yesterday and I’ve been playing with it this morning.

It’s an Inspiron 1750 – a honkin’ big thing (much too big to sit on my lap) with a 17 inch monitor, but noticeably lighter than our 17 inch HP “tank.” I like the finish: a glossy piano black cover that’s very classy looking and a nice brushed gray with black keyboard that includes a number pad (as most of the 17 and 18 inchers do, but I’m used to small ultracompacts that don’t).

It has a 2.10 GHz T4300 dual core processor and 4 GB of RAM and came with 64 bit Windows Home Premium installed. It also came with the ugliest Dell wallpaper I’ve ever seen and a slew of software “extras” (i.e., crapware) that I didn’t want. The first thing I did after the setup was change that wallpaper; the second thing was to remove the McAfee Security Suite that started driving me nuts right from the beginning. Thank goodness there are better behaved AV solutions like VIPRE.

I haven’t had a chance to run the battery down yet; according to Windows, it has 4 hours and 39 minutes remaining with a 95% charge. If that’s accurate, that’s pretty good battery life for a laptop its size.

It took way too long to get booted up at first, but that’s not because of Windows or the hardware; it’s all those “extras” Dell installed. I’ve been steadily removing them. One thing that I did keep was the one year subscription to LoJack, the anti-theft service.

For now, I’ve kept the odd little Mac-like dock at the top of the screen, too. It actually sort of serves the purpose of a separate quick launch bar, something that you can’t do in Windows 7 (you can add the QL bar to the taskbar, but – as far as I’ve been able to tell – there’s no way to detach it and make it its own separate toolbar). You can add your own shortcuts to the dock, so I’ve customized it and I actually like it.

Once you cut through the unwanted programs, free trials and so forth, performance is pretty good. Of course, I haven’t yet installed much software of my own, but I think it’s going to be a pretty useable computer. It’s way too big for me to serve as my only laptop. But I can see taking it on trips, along with a smaller machine. I prefer my tiny Sony for carrying around at conferences, in meetings, and so forth. But I often find myself coming back to the hotel at night and having to do more complex work that requires me to research the web while working on a Word document, for instance, and a large screen and better keyboard would definitely be welcome then.

All in all, it’s a decent computer. It’s not the one I would have picked for myself, but for the price (which of course is not “nothing” since I’ll have to pay taxes on it, but will end up being about 33% of the retail price of $750, or less than $300), it’s a darn good deal. So – thank you, Microsoft and Dell.

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com

Facebook has more than 300 million active users worldwide. That makes it a great resource for social networking – but it also makes it a very attractive target for scammers and hackers. If you're a Facebook user, be aware that a number of exploits have surfaced this past week, attempting to take advantage of the inherent trust that many users exhibit toward email they receive from the social networking service. I received two different attempts to scam me under the guise of Facebook, in my email Inbox.

One was pretty obvious to anyone who’s been around the ‘Net for a while. It shows “Facebook” as the sender but a check of the mail headers shows that the Reply To address is somewhere in Germany:

Another clue is that the message was sent to a user account that doesn’t even exist in our domain. Scammers and spammers often do this, using a shotgun approach by sending mail to hundreds or thousands of names at a particular domain and hoping some of them will be legit user accounts.

The message itself contains instructions that should immediately make anyone suspicious. It claims that you need to submit a new account agreement to Facebook – by unzipping an attached file and running agreement.exe.

Now if Facebook did decide to require you to agree to new terms, they would almost certainly send you a message with a link to their web site, not an executable file to run. Only the least tech savvy users will fall for this one – but there are quite a few users among that 300 million who are not all that tech savvy. I, of course, immediately scanned the attachment with a virus scanner, and found that it contains a virus called VirTool:Win32/VBInject.gen!CN. Luckily, most anti-virus programs that are up to date will be able to detect it.

The second scam attempt was a lot more subtle and thus a lot more dangerous. You're probably used to getting email notifications when your friends comment on your status updates or send you private messages, and you may click on those emails automatically to take you to your FB page. A few days ago, I received several messages that purported to be from Facebook, saying "Caroline sent you a message" (or some other name – I actually received three of these claiming I had messages from three different names).

However, I immediately noticed that the link in these messages was not the usual multi-line URL that begins with www.facebook.com, but instead the domain was www.facebook.montadalitihad.com . Hmmm … . I typed that into a browser that was sandboxed in a virtual machine for just such purposes, and discovered that I got a page that looks like the normal Facebook log in page. Obviously the point of this phishing scam is to get you to type your Facebook username and password in so someone else can use them to hijack your account.

Another clue that something’s not quite right is that only a first name is given as the sender of the message; a real Facebook notification generally contains first and last name in the subject line (with just the first name in the body of the message). And another subtle clue is in the disclaimer at the bottom, which says “This message was intended for You.”  In a real Facebook message, it says “This message was intended for <your email address>.”

These are differences that the typical user is likely not to notice. Even if you’re pretty technically inclined, you might be in a hurry or just not fully paying attention, and click on that link. Watch out for this one if you routinely respond to email notifications from Facebook by using the embedded links. Better yet, just wait until you log onto Facebook in your browser and check your messages then, from within your page.  If you aren’t sure whether a message is legit, check your Facebook Inbox. These scam messages, of course, won’t be there.

Facebook is a great site, but as with any other Internet technology, it pays to use it carefully.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com

It’s been a busy free weeks. One thing that has occupied way too much of my time: my decision to give Linux one more try. Over the years, I’ve tried installing various distros, from Red Hat to SuSE to Mandrake to Xandros and a few others I can’t remember off-hand. I tried installing on the bare metal, on older computers, on newer computers, in virtual machines. In each and every case, either the OS wouldn’t install at all or it had serious problems (such as inability to display correctly) that resulted in my saying “to heck with this” within a few days.

This time, I hung my hopes on Ubuntu 9.10.  I’d heard that it was “better” and “easier” and very Windows-like. Maybe this was the Linux that would finally work for me. Well … not. The first few attempts to install in VMware 6.5 failed completely. It went through the installation process but upon reboot, just stuck there and wouldn’t do anything. After paying $99 for VMware 7, I was able to get it to install and get to a desktop and actually click around to some applications.

I wasn’t particularly impressed. It seemed functional, but certainly not as elegant as Windows 7 (or, for that matter, OS X). But then, you get what you pay for and I didn’t pay a dime for it. So okay. I messed with it for a couple of days. Even something that’s as simple as a couple of clicks in Windows – installing the VMware tools – requires opening a terminal and using the command line to uncompress a file before you can install it. Sheesh.

This morning, I started to play with it again and discovered its Internet connectivity was gone. It had also slowed down to a crawl. No problem; I’ll reboot. That always fixes a general slowdown in Windows (although my Windows machines never just up and lose their connectivity on our gigabit wired Ethernet network). Oops, bad decision. The reboot hung up on the splash screen, and the VMware capture the mouse pointer and held it hostage. Couldn’t shut down or close the VM because when you tried to click something outside the VM, the mouse jumped back into the VM. Now I’m not blaming Ubuntu for that (other than for hanging in the first place). That’s a VMware problem. But it was frustrating. Luckily you can use keyboard shortcuts to end the VM process in Task Manager and kill it without having to do a hard reboot of the whole system.

However, this rant isn’t about the stability of the Ubuntu OS. I’m willing to accept that Linux just hates me and thus I have problems with it that others don’t have. I know people who seem to have the same relationship with Windows; everything they try to do results in error messages and mysterious freezes and hangups that don’t occur when someone else performs the same task on the same machine. What this is about is something that I noticed on one of Ubuntu’s intro screens during all this.

The sentence that jumped out at me said something like “We believe software should be free.” And I started thinking about the utter absurdity of that statement. It’s fine to believe that people should be able to give away the software they write if they want to. Of course they should. Just as an artist should be able to give away his/her painting, or a lawyer should be able to take on a case pro bono or a doctor should be able to forego billing a patient. It’s your work product. You should be able to do whatever you want with it.

But to say software “should” be free implies something entirely different. It says a programmer should not be able to profit from his work (or even recoup the costs incurred in doing it). It’s like saying food should be free – and shame on grocery stores and restaurants for ever making people pay for it. Actually, that makes more sense because food is a basic human necessity, while computer software, despite its seeming ubiquity, is still not essential to life.

The problem with working for free is that there are only two groups of people who can do it on a full time basis: those who are already independently wealthy and don’t need any more money, and those who are being supported by someone else (parents, spouses, the government). Otherwise, the “free” work gets done by amateurs who are doing it part time, just for the love of doing it. That sounds all nice and cuddly, but what it translates into is no quality control and no accountability.

If I’m injured and bleeding, I prefer to be treated by a full time doctor, not an amateur. If I’m on trial for my life, I want the best attorney money can buy, not the one who dabbles in criminal defense as a hobby, even if he/she doesn’t charge me anything for it. Free software is fine to play around but if I have to depend on it to get my work done, I’ll take commercial software any day. And I’m obviously not alone in that opinion, judging by the fact that even though it’s free, Linux is still way down there in single digits for desktop market share, and currently has less than 15% of the server market (IDC, 2009). Businesses don’t trust “free” and in fact, those varieties of *NIX that are used in business are the ones that come with paid support contracts that make them similar in cost to Windows and Apple products.

I know this will make some of my friends who are Linux fans mad, but I’m giving you the perspective of someone who is used to using Windows – which is the perspective of most computer users. Going from Windows to Linux is just not something most people would do if Linux weren’t free. For some, especially in today’s economy, price is what matters most and they’re willing to put up with the increased difficulty to save money. And that’s cool. Everything is a tradeoff and there should be alternatives. It’s when people start trying to turn it into a matter of right and wrong (“software should be free”) that I get annoyed. I could look at Apple’s model and say “software should be free to run on any hardware and not tied to the software vendor’s machines.” But I won’t, because Apple should be able to price their product the way they want. As should everybody else.

That’s what “free” is really about.

deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com