One of the complaints was Zuckerberg will be worth $28 billion and it’s not like Facebook is “the cure for cancer or HIV.” This is true, but just look around at how people are getting rich these days. You’ve got CEO’s of companies like Enron, Tyco, World Com, etc who destroyed peoples lives. Or how about Halliburton who is making a fortune off war torn countries, among others, with a revenue of $24.8 billion in 2011, drilling for oil. That’s some serious blood money. And you can speculate we went to war for the sole purpose of giving Halliburton those no bid contracts. But where is all the hate for David Lesar CEO & president of Halliburton… Or Monsanto, who is genetically modifying our food supply and driving small farmers out of business with B.S. lawsuits and other unscrupulous business dealings. And there’s all the banks, who are making money off people who are losing their homes. Or the people investing in oil futures? Then you have a guy who made his fortune destroying companies & ruing peoples lives , and he’s a Presidential candidate. We also have the pharmaceutical industry, which at times can help people, but want to have patents on life saving drugs so they can continue charging a premium, while many can’t afford medication that could change or even save their lives. I could go on and on and I’m sure you can think of your own examples, but hopefully you get the point. Many, if not most, of the self made millionaires, made their fortunes off the suffering of others. Has Facebook or Zuckerberg done anything remotely close to the evil that these previous examples have done?

One of the other complaints I saw a lot of was the privacy issue and the selling of people’s personal info. This one is a somewhat reasonable complaint. But on the other hand, it is not uncommon for any website that is free. If people actually read the TOS (terms of service) of the websites they use or software they use, they would find this is a common practice. Not that it’s right, but it’s not something that only Facebook is guilty of. Most websites, even if they don’t sell your data to advertisers, use cookies to track you and your web surfing activity. The simple fix for this is, don’t post anything you don’t want public. This holds true for any website. Even if they aren’t selling your info to advertisers, currently, they could update their TOS or privacy statement at any moment. Did you know Apple has a GPS database in your iPhone, so Apple knows the exact location, time and date of everywhere you have gone and even how long you spent at that location. Apple has full access to this info as long as your iPhone batteries aren’t dead. Not to mention Apple didn’t disclose this at all to their customers.  They are logging all of this this, but wouldn’t admit it until a hacker discovered it. To me, this is much more offensive and a much bigger privacy concern than any website informing  you they can sell your information if you use their website.

I’m not posting this because I feel a need to defend Facebook. With over 845 million users, there’s no need for that. And personally I really don’t care if people use Facebook or not. I just didn’t know so many people seemed to hate Facebook. And if memory serves, I never saw so many people leaving negative comments about Facebook until Zuckerberg became one of the richest people in the world. So I think a lot of this hate came from him getting so rich. Apparently there are also hundreds of new millionaires thanks to Facebook. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think this is a bad thing. As I demonstrated earlier, there are far worse ways of getting rich, and those were all legal, albeit slimy in my opinion. All I’m attempting to do here is put things in perspective. If you’re going to be outraged at how people get rich, it seems to me there are a lot of ways that are far worse than creating a social website.

Another reason I don’t loath Facebook is because of what it has done for me personally. Sometime in December of 2010, I was on another social website which you may have herd of, My Space. Though my My Space activity had sharply dropped off from the time I first started uploading the music I made to it. I was still visiting it once in a blue moon to see if anyone was listening to the music I made. One of my old friends & band mates had found my page. He sent me a message suggesting that I join Facebook (thanks Los) because a lot of the “old gang” (not gang members) are on there. So I did as he suggested and before I knew it, I was reconnecting with almost all my old friends. When I moved away from LA, I lost contact with almost all of my friends. I’m talking about close friends that I grew up with. For various reasons, I hadn’t herd from or talked to most of these people since the 90′s. As time went on, almost everyone I had grown up with was in touch with me again on Facebook. Lots of these people were dear friends and there was virtually no other way I could have found them. The only thing I really regretted about moving away was losing contact with all my friends. Sure, I could have paid a website $40 a pop to try and find them, but thanks to Facebook, I didn’t have to spend a dime or countless hours finding them. I was overjoyed to find these people again. A piece of my life that had been missing for over 15 years was restored. I wouldn’t have dreamed of ever talking to some of these people ever again. It was stunning that I was able to get back in touch with so many old friends, so easily, on one website. And that is why Facebook is so valuable to me. Having all of these  friends back in my life, is priceless.

There is a need to protect copyright on the internet, but not at the cost of our First Amendment. America was founded on this principal and these Bills threaten the concept our forefathers fought for and believed so greatly in.

Until I can really do this subject justice, I’ll post a link that you can use to learn more today’s protest

http://americancensorship.org/

This time I learned that if you really want to run OS X on a PC, you need to find out what hardware people have used to do it before. The Sony VAIO laptop I tried it on seemed to have some incomparable hardware. This was just a test run and someone had loaned me the laptop just so I could see if I could do it. I had to give the laptop back before I could really figure out what the problem was.

I wanted to let you know in case you read my previous post and were waiting for a follow up. SO here is the follow up, and since it didn’t work, I’m not going to waste a lot of time for either of us going into everything I tried. Basically, I tried to install several versions in Virtual Machine and when that didn’t work I tried to make a dual boot setup using what amount to boot loaders for OS X and PC’s, and they had the same problems that Virtual Machine had. I did this just to verify that Virtual Machine wasn’t the root of my problems.

This is over for now. Next time I get some new hardware and some more time, I will give it another shot.

However, this is about to change. I’ve spent the week gathering information on creating my own Hackintosh. So far, it hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would. I started out trying to install a retail version of OS X Leopard & Snow Leopard using VMPlayer. None of them worked, but the attempts were not in vain. I’ve learned quite a bit about the different ways you can install OS X on a PC.

Now I must get back to my exploration of OSx86 and figure out what kind of Hackintosh I am going to create. We are burning the midnight oil here in the CyberTek lab and won’t be satisfied until we see something resembling OS X installed and working on one of the computers here.

Exciting  news here at PC Cybertek! I’ve expanded the capabilities of the void of sunlight, purple walled, silver celling, neon lit, smoke filled, PC Cybtek Laboratory. And yes, that is an accurate description of the lab. But who cares what the room I spend countless hours staring at monitors looks or smells like? I’ve finally done what I have been threating to do for ages. Get on with it already you say… OK OK After the break, I’ll tell you

On the bench now sits a computer specifically to test security, learn more about virus and malware infections and create tutorials, nay, create videos of how to remove said virus & malware. Up until now, when I came across something I needed to remove from someone’s computer, I would take notes. If I thought what I learned while cleaning the computer might help someone else, I would post about it here and do my best to reconstruct what was done from my notes. There has always been a couple of problems with this method. First  I have to find and identify the infection. I don’t keep step by step notes of this part and even if I did, trying write about it isn’t easy. Then, trying to recall everything I did and translate it into something that the reader can follow, can also be tricky. Then there is all the work involved to bring this info to you. After I spend hours hunting down, identifying and removing the virus, I have to spend on average, a couple hours at least, writing about how I did it. And I have to do it while my memory is still fresh or risk leaving out some critical info. And to be honest, my only motivation, to do all this work is to be a nice guy. I don’t get paid for this blog, on the contrary, it costs me money to keep it going. Money is something that isn’t abundant around here and suggesting that people visit my sponsors, if they want to support this site, is something that violates the Adsense rules and resulted in them pulling their ads from my site (and left me with $50 in my adsense account which I will never get  )  As you can see it costs me time and money to keep this site up.

The solution I’ve come up with is, video tutorials on a fresh OS. No, this won’t pay for the site, but it will make my job easier. I’ve installed Virtual Machine on the lab’s computer so I can deliberately infect a Virtual Machine (VM) and record the process of removing it. This way I don’t have to spend all the time taking notes and trying to reconstruct it in a blog post. It also solves the problem of cross contamination. When I’m removing a virus, manually, from a clients computer, chances are they have more than one problem. With a fresh Windows install running on a VM, the removal instructions I’m making are all related to the focus of the tutorial and not other software issues or malware.

Of course you’ll miss out on the long winded,  and at times almost witty posts. But I’m sure you’ll survive. And if everything goes as planed, you will get video that will show you exactly what to do. I can also go into more detail as to why I do things the way I do them. With my audio engineering and video editing background, they should look and sound pretty good too.  I look forward bringing you my first video tutorial soon.

Before you go, I have a question for you. Can you recommend a screen recording program for making  these videos? I’ve used Cam Studio but I know there are quite a few of these programs available.  I would prefer if it had both audio and video, but video only will work if there is some features unique to the video only program. I’ll probably edit the whole thing in Vegas Pro so I can dub in the audio either way. If you have any recommendations, please leave them in the comments below.

Thankz,

PC Cybertek Chris

from: Administration of Facebook [official-no.893@facebook.com]
subject: Facebook Support. Personal data has been changed! No81864
attachment: Facebook_Password_INM.152.zip (99k)

body:

Security service of FaceBook.

Your password is not secure!
To secure your account the password has been changed automatically!
Attached document contains a new password to your account and detailed information about new security measures.

Thank you for attention,
Your Facebook

He was astonished at the ease with which he twisted Deane upon his back and put the handcuffs about his wrists.The work was no sooner done than he understood. A rag was tied about Deanes head, and it was stained with blood. The mans arms and body were limp. He looked at Billy with dulled eyes, and as he slowly realized what had happened a groan broke from his lips. In an instant Billy was on his knees beside him. He had seen Deane twice before, over at Churchill, but this was the first time that he had ever looked closely into his face. It was a face worn by hardship and mental torture. The cheeks were thinned, and the steel-gray eyes that looked up into Billys were reddened by weeks and months of fighting against storm. It was the face, not of a criminal, but of a man whom Billy would have trusted– blonde-mustached, fearless, and filled with that clean-cut strength which associates itself with fairness and open fighting.

That’s kind of weird, isn’t it. I mean do they think this little piece of a story will make you lose all control and run the attached virus file? Maybe the author is looking for a book deal and wants to steal a publishers identification. Either way, do not open the attachment, it contains a virus/trojan. At the time of this writing, 25 of 42 antivirus programs detect it, according to VirusTotal

One final thought. Facebook has come under major attack lately. By now you should know better than to ever open an attachment from anyone you don’t expect to get one from. I would also go a step farther, and not click on any links that come in e-mails claiming to be from Facebook. Just go directly to Facebook, either by typing in the address yourself, or using a bookmark YOU created yourself.
Stay Safe

I’m going to make this short and sweet to get the word out there. I will delve further into what actual malware is being served and what the effects are at a further date.

The following image was taken from a screen shot I made. It shows the fake video player that shows a rotating “waiting” graphic and pretends that it can’t load the video because it needs to be updated.

I knew this was a threat because I’m also a video editor and I keep all my codecs up to date. However, I thought I would pursue this further so I could see what file was going to be installed. Then I could run analysis on it and report my findings here. But I was running ESET NOD32 and it recognized this page was a threat and also blocked whatever this page tried top send me. You can see the results below.

So just don’t update your video player through any website that claims your video player needs to be update to view an online video. I would imagine there will be variations of this soon. Like fake Quicktime Player or Windows Media Player updates. I will grab a copy of the file this site is trying to distribute, for further analysis, later and post my findings here. That’s going to take some time and I have seen this fake xvid update a couple times now and decided I should spread the word sooner rather than later.

United Nations Assisted Program
Directorate of International Payment
United Nations Liaison Office – Africa

Fund Beneficiary,

This email is to notify you about the release of your outstanding payment which is truly $4.7 million. The Federal Government scheduled a time frame to settle all foreign debts which includes Contract/Inheritance/Gambling/ Lottery (Sponsored by Microsoft and UK National Lottery) and other international loans. News had it that over the past, numerous individual(s) who happen to be impostors (claiming to be individuals, banks and organizations) are claiming to release numerous sums of fund via numerous ways.

You have two options to receive your payment which is either a Pin Based ATM card or Certified Cashiers Check. You are advised to select one out of the two options on how you wish to receive your $4.7 million. Your ATM card or Check/Bank Draft will be shipped via FedEx Shipping Company and would get to you within 2 to 3 working days at most.

DO NOT SEND MONEY TO ANYONE UNTIL YOU READ THIS:
We had to sign contract with them for bulk shipping which makes the fees reduce from the actual $125.99 to $96.99 nothing more and no hidden fees of any sort! You are advised to contact the dispatch officer responsible for the shipping of your Check or ATM card with the following information for shipping of your payment Check or ATM card.

Dispatch Officer: Dr.James Don
Email:jamesdon9522@yahoo.com.hk
Telephone: +234 70 3109 2113

As requested, provide the following information’s to my office:

Recipient full Name………….
Shipment Address:……………
Nationality…………………
Age:……………………….
Sex:……………………….
Current Occupation:………….
Home or Cell Phone:………….
Select Your preferred Payment Method (Check or ATM):……….

The dispatch officer will provide you with instructions on how you are to make payment of the $96.99 only for the shipping of your ATM card or Cashiers Check.

Remember that you are not paying any fees extra no matter what. Once again note that the actual FedEx Retail Price: $125.99 Your Price (Because of our contract signed): $96.99 ($29.00 Savings!).

Respectfully,
Amb. Anthony Moore
UN Envoy (African Region)

So do yourself a favor and don’t send these people any of your info.