WinAntivirus - Mac users falling for it?

I received two calls today from clients who "fell for" a "winantivirus" popup, AKA smitfraud. For those who don't know, that's a scam popup that often results in a "drive-by download" - a virus that installs itself on your machine without you clicking anything.

It varies all the time but may look something like this:



It alerts you to several viruses that it says are currently on your machine, then directs you to download their antivirus software that will fix everything. Of course, it doesn't fix anything, and in many cases it is the thing that is infecting your computer. It is sometimes very hard to remove.

I get calls about such scams almost every day, but what makes today interesting is that these aren't Windows users. It's two clients who switched to Mac over two years ago.

Thankfully, these types of scam software doesn't even work on Macs. But the website that the popup directs you to asks for credit card and other personal information as they process your "order" for this crap. That, of course means they're stealing your money and likely worse.

Windows 7

I just put Windows 7 Ultimate RTM on a pretty modest test machine (P4HT, 512MB RAM, Intel Graphics).

Despite the fact that it's a low-end machine, I'm very impressed.

Many of the things that were quirky about the UI (user interface) on Vista are much better. Overall, the interface seems smarter, and more user-friendly. A frequent complaint about Vista is the UAC (User Account Control) pop-ups. With Vista, even when a user is simply changing their desktop background, they're asked to authenticate/approve the change. Many UAC pop-ups require two separate approval clicks. Windows 7 gets a big plus in the user-friendliness department - UAC pop-ups are very infrequent. In fact, I haven't seen any since installing it.

One thing I hate about Vista is the Sidebar. Without exception, I turn it off immediately when setting up a client machine. When clients have it already enabled, I often simply ask them if they care about the "clock, calendar, and sample photos" that the default "sidebar" includes. 98 times out of 100 they don't, and I kill the whole thing. One less thing running can't hurt performance. I like the idea of Gadgets, but hate the fact that Vista sticks them in a window that interferes with other things. In Windows 7, the gadgets are independent - little "windows" on their own, without actual windows of course.

There are some things I'm "on the fence" about, however. A feature of Vista that I think is great is the Windows Photo Gallery. I think it gave Windows users a near equivalent to the Mac iPhoto application. Unfortunately, it's gone by default in Windows 7, but Microsoft offers "Windows Live Photo Gallery" as a replacement. It requires you to have a Windows Live (or MSN/Hotmail) account, and also requires that you login to the service to use it. I don't see the customer benefit of this change, since the program seems to work very similarly to the Vista program. If Microsoft wants to integrate Windows Live features into it, I wish they had made it an optional setting so that the user could simply use it on their local machine.

Despite my minor misgivings, seeing how well it's running on this old-ish POS, I'm likely going to put the retail Windows 7 upgrade package on at least one of my own machines.

Three tech things today

1. Sorry, Linux... We won't be friends after all.
After extensive "playing around" with the new netbook, I've decided that Ubuntu (both 8.04 and 9.04) are not for me. Too many things didn't quite work, and too many things needed command line work (sudo judo) to function. It may be good for some, but not me.

2. Hello Hackintosh.
So once I decided that I didn't want Linux on the netbook, the question remained - what to install?
Rather than putting XP on the netbook, I decided to follow the 20 or so steps clearly documented on the web to install OSX 10.5.7 on the netbook. And yes, I stuck a small Apple sticker on it. I've gotten it working quite well, and faster than I'd ever imagined. I even got bluetooth working properly (took a little extra work), which leads me to...

3. BLUETOOTH INTERNET TETHERING

Now this is pretty damn cool. Basically, on either the "real" mac or the "hackintosh", I have gotten the iPhone 3GS's new "Internet Tethering" to work. This will allow me to "borrow" the phone's 3G connection via bluetooth and use it on either computer. And no, that's not a stock shot - that's my phone's home screen.

UPDATE - Apparently it also works on Windows machines connected via USB.

Vista strikes again...

I used to have two windows XP machnes in my office, and used to be able to print to their printers from my mac.

Now I've got a Vista machine, and cannot get the damn thing to connect to the shared printers.

I've tried everything, and have resorted to creating pdf files on the mac, saving them to a pocket drive, or copying them to the vista machine over the network (yes, I can see/modify files) and then printing them from windows directly...

Very frustrating.