Worldwide Slump Makes Nigeria's Online Scammers Work That Much Harder

Anyone with email has received the notes asking for help with thousands or millions of dollars - just cash my check for me etc. It looks like Americans are the softest touches, according to the Washington Post.

"U.S. authorities say Americans -- the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers -- lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code. Now financially squeezed, Americans succumb even more easily to offers of riches, experts say.

Though statistics are fuzzy, the FBI-backed Internet Crime Complaint Center says that scam reports by Americans grew 33 percent last year, and that after the United States and Britain, Nigeria housed the most perpetrators. Ultrascan, a Dutch research firm that investigates complaints of 419 fraud, says online scam offers from Nigerians in and outside their homeland have mushroomed this year."

The weakest link in any network security is not the hardware or software, but the people using the network. It looks like that would be especially true in the U.S. Here's the link to the entire article.

Worldwide Slump Makes Nigeria's Online Scammers Work That Much Harder


And here's another take from Tech Republic.

Nigerian 419 scammers: What you didn't know

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Blu-ray Pulls Ahead of HD DVD, but Old Discs Will Stick Around

From the Washington Post:

Don't throw out the DVD collection yet.

Blu-ray
HD DVD
Sony
Toshiba
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What Should and Should Not Be on Your New Computer

If the Washington Post says so, it must be true?

What Should and Should Not Be on Your New Computer

Hmmm... it's worth it for MOST people to download Firefox instead of Explorer? For our unsophisticated customers it seems to cause more problems than it solves... and we haven't needed a backup for Safari yet...

Are we looking for free tools? We find some customers getting themselves in trouble by trying to save a few bucks on non-Microsoft tools ("I don't like Microsoft becaues they're too big, but I'm not going to buy a Mac and I'm not going to use Outlook...") or insisting on free tools period. That's great if you know enough to work around compatability and feature issues, but for most people it's not worth the hassle.

Linux really needs the software downloads more than Mac or the PC...

I'll go with their what shouldn't be on the new home computer with the exception of the Windows operating system tag with the key - it's not NASCAR, but boy is that sticker a must have (along with the recovery disk!).

Apple
home computer
Linux
Mac
Microsoft
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