Shopping Anyone?

My least favorite store in the whole world is having a sale on a laptop computer.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8878832&type=product&id=1210379318661

OK, maybe Best Buy isn't my least favorite store but I dislike it so much that I can't really discern my loathing for the place from Michael's, the other store I can't bear to walk into.

The good news is that you don't have to walk into Best Buy and suffer the incompetents or the greed in excess that they represent. (see I just can't help myself...I have no love for the place) You can get this laptop off their website. Do note that it's an outlet item. Meaning that it's either been refurbished or is a discontinued model. But it comes with full warranty and that's really what matters.

Dual Core AMD Processor, 3GB of ram, 200GB hard drive, 15" screen, DVD-RW and Vista Home Premium. $599

Two things to note: you won't be able to connect this laptop to the office network since its running a home version of Vista. But that can be upgraded for $99 once you get it, if you want it for work. If you're going to use it for home, it's all set. The other thing is that "supposedly" the stores are going to have a couple in stock with more RAM and a bigger hard drive.

One more item of shopping advice, those $349 laptops at Wallmart...don't do it unless you view the thing as disposable and aren't going to bring it into the office. We saw a few of those last year and the buyers spent more money fixing them up than they paid for it in the first place. In the end, not a good bargain. That was definitely a buyer beware item.

Happy Shopping and Happy Thanksgiving. I hope that everyone has a relaxing weekend.

Get Your 50% Depreciation and Dell Optiplex

Back in July I posted a review of the Economic Stimulus Act and it's benefits for small business. Below is the summary of what it contains for small business. You can read my full post here: http://smalltechnotes.blogspot.com/search?q=economic+stimulus+act+of+2008 Just keep in mind that I'm not an accountant, so before you make a purchasing decision check with one.

• Depreciation bonus at-a-glance
  The Economic Stimulus Act allows additional first-year depreciation of 50 percent of the purchase cost.
  The depreciation bonus helps businesses that buy equipment this year cut their 2008 tax bill.
  The bonus applies to purchases of tangible personal property with tax lives of 20 years or less, among other things.
  Equipment must be purchased and placed in service in 2008.
  
• Section 179 expensing at-a-glance
  
  The Economic Stimulus Act nearly doubles the Section 179 expensing limit to US$250,000 from US$128,000.
  Companies can expense up to US$250,000 in purchases as long as they don't spend more than US$800,000.
  New and used equipment is eligible for expensing.
  The expensing limit can be combined with the depreciation bonus.

***I also wanted to mention to you a great deal that Dell is having currently on Optiplex desktop computers. These make great general office computers. Check out the Optiplex 360. For $529 you get a flat screen monitor, 4Gb of ram and Vista Business edition. (or XP) Dell won't have this offer for long. http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=bpdq3gm&c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&kc=features~hot_offers_dt

Happy Shopping!

Where's My Spam?

The above graph is a visual report of our email traffic from Exchange Defender. The orange and blue represent spam. Notice something curious? Yep, there's hardly any orange and about half as much blue. So what happened? A miracle! Unfortunately it's temporary.

big providers of Internet connections named in it -- Hurricane Electric Internet Services and Global Crossing Ltd. -- acted quickly to cut ties to the core subject of the document, a little-known Silicon Valley company called McColo Corp. that rents out servers to clients.
The researchers didn't say whether McColo knowingly aided criminals, but they described some of the nefarious activities conducted on some websites the company hosted. Among other things, McColo reportedly enabled its customers to control vast networks of hijacked computers to send spam and take payments for fake anti-virus software

Basically an Internet company in California was shutdown by amateur spam researches who concluded that several large companies were aiding McColo corp in the delivery of spam. Those companies got scared by the allegations and shut down their connection to McColo corp. The impact was enormous and it has reduced spam by 65% worldwide.

Eventually it is expected that McColo corp will find new providers for its Internet activities and will be back to pushing spam. In the meantime, we can enjoy reduced spam, and faster delivery of email.

I guess we should consider it a holiday gift that we get some of the bandwidth back that we pay for and some of the productivity back that we lose by managing spam. But obviously our anti-spam laws are not working at all. If they were then McColo and his enablers would all be sitting in jail. I hope that re-writing the Can-Spam law is on the agenda for the new Congress.

Warning: Bank Fraud

We have seen an increase in the number of banking fraud emails. Most are directed at Bank of America but recently it has expanded to other banks. The email will look something like this:

LaSalle Bank Consumers Warning:

Please be advised that we cannot guarantee the confidentiality of not protected information.

Therefore, we strongly encourage you to update your system.

New Bank of America x.509 privacy certificate for LaSalle Bank consumers can be downloaded from our customer service department.

Proceed to customer service department>> <http://welcomelasalle.averylongaddress.com> .

LaSalle Bank and Bank of America will not be responsible for any damages, if you ignore this warning.

Sincerely, Caroline Blankenship.

2008 LaSalle Bank and Bank of America Community.

I have edited the link above so it doesn't go anywhere. But clicking on the original link would download an SSL certificate to your computer. This certificate allows an encrypted tunnel to be created between you and the bad guys when you visit your bank. Thus allowing them to capture your credentials the next time you log into your online banking site.

To protect yourself you should never click on a link from your bank or credit card company (or ebay or paypal for that matter) rather if you have something you need to do there, go to the site.

 

As an aside, I've been waiting for the bad guys to figure out how to use SSL to infect our computers. SSL is the encryption used at https websites. It encrypts the data going between you and the website so no one can read it. It is used by every online shopping, banking, tax, etc website on the web. Sounds like a great idea on the surface, but that no one includes your anti-virus, anti-spam and firewall too. So, if the secure website you've gone to turns out to not be so secure there could be bad stuff coming through that tunnel and there's no way to detect it until it's too late. I think that we're going to start to see an uptick on this type of attack. So as usual keep your eyes open be cautious.