They are all fake, bogus, not really from Paypal, Amazon or Wells Fargo. They are e-mail scams. Sending of this kind
of e-mail is called "phishing" as in fishing for suckers.

I get a at least a couple of these every week and because I'm a computer geek
I know how to tell that they are fake but I suspect most people don't including
many of my friends and family. It really sucks that the net makes it so
easy for bad people to screw over good people but that's they way it is for now.

Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and many others are working on solutions but in the
meantime, hopefully the instructions below will help you avoid getting taken in
by these phishing scams.

The first thing to look at is the To address. In my case, my Paypal account is
not registered to gregg@yahoo.com or gregg@activestate.com so clearly this is
fraudulent mail. For those of you that use only one e-mail address you're
unlikely to get that lucky. Most likely your real e-mail address will appear
there but if it's not the correct e-mail address you already know it's fake.
Delete it.

Now it gets more difficult. What you have to do is check if the link in
the e-mail actually goes to the site it claims it's from. The link might
appear to go to Paypal but what it shows and where it actually goes are separate
things.

The first thing you can check, especially if you are using web based e-mail,
"hover" the mouse cursor over the link. Your browser *might* show where
the link goes in the status bar of the browser

Here we can see that link is not going to Paypal. It's going to some
site called 200.181.57.130. Clearly this link is fake.

Unfortunately, even if it said Paypal.com in the status bar that doesn't mean the link
would actually go to Paypal. There are ways of hiding that. In other
words, this step might tell you immediately if the link is fake but if looks
like a valid URL you still have to dig deeper.

 In most e-mail programs and e-mail websites you can right click on the
e-mail and pick "View Source"

This will bring up some kind of program that shows you the codes used to
display the e-mail you are looking at. It will most likely look like lots
of gibberish. You need to search for what you see as the link. In
the case of example #1 above I searched for "Click here"

If it doesn't find it you can pretty much be sure the mail is fake. In
my case it found it.

Now, we have to look for the part just before that that says href=

and to the right of that we see the actual link

Again, it's not Paypal so this is fake.  In the case of examples
#2 and #3 above they show links so I searched for part of the link
("https://www.paypal")

I found it here and what do you know, the actual link goes to some site
called only666times.de. Yes, some asshole is trying to rob me again.

Note that you still have to be careful because the link might only be subtly
fake. I've seen links like http://paypal.com.someothersite.tw or other
convoluted things that try to make the link appear real.

Unfortunately it gets worse. It's possible for that even if the links look 100%
correct the e-mail is designed to take you somewhere else. Technically
e-mail links can be programmed to so that when you click the link a small piece
of code runs. That code, instead of going to the link you see specified can
take you to some other link instead and unfortunately there is no easy way to
look that kind of hack up. Most e-mail programs attempt to remove those hacks. 
For example a full up to date and patched Outlook will tell you the e-mail has
scripts in it. Scripts = code. If it says this you know the e-mail is fake. No
legitimate e-mail has scripts in it.

For gmail and Yahoo mail they both attempt to delete the scripts
from the e-mail but there is probably a way around most of them.

The best advice is, first, if it's not important, ignore the e-mail.
Otherwise, if you are concerned and if you've followed all the
steps above and the mail looks like it might actually be legit, don't click the
link.  Instead, manually launch a browser window, go directly to the site
yourself, log into your account for the site in
question and ask their customer service directly if there is something they need
to talk to you about.

(the e-mail addresses above have been changed and are not real)

It's free to use and download.

It requires Microsoft .NET 2.0. If you don’t already have that installed you can download it here

Download:

You can download the installer by clicking the link below.

flickrdown 2.43

THERE IS NO WARRANTY HERE.  USE THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK!  THERE IS ALSO NO SUPPORT!

Version History:

• 2.43 – 2007/06/24
  • Fixed issue with [*All Photos*]

• 2.42 – 2007/06/23
  • Integrated latest Flick.NET library which seems to have fixed issues with downloading some images
  • Relaxed naming of files

• 2.41 – 2007/03/22
  • Fixed source URL change on flickr.com so images uploaded after 3/1/2007 will download

• 2.40 – 2006/10/05
  • Added history to search and folder
  • Added support for gif and png originals
  • Added settable download limit

• 2.30 – 2006/04/09
  • increased limit from 100 to 500 photos per set, tag, etc.

• 2.20 – 2006/02/04
  • fixed photo links

• 2.10 – 2005/12/10
  • fixed bad download URL (i hope)

• 2.00 – 2005/11/23
  • updated to the release version of .NET 2.0
  • added support for tags
  • added support for groups
  • added support for private images

• 1.30 – 2005/06/26
  • if the user name had a space in it the link to the picture was wrong.

• 1.20 – 2005/06/18
  • If you didn’t acutally expand the photos (clicking on the name of the set) it would download the “all photos” category. That’s now fixed.

• 1.10 – 2005/06/05
  • No files are overwritten. If a file of the same name already exists Flickrdown will append "-fd????" where ???? is a number. This allows Flickrdown to download pictures that have the same title to from the same set.

• 1.00 – 2005/05/02
  • Released

Today I just got it to the point that I think I can use it on this site.  I wrote it basically because at the time, last November, I couldn’t find any blogging software that did what Tanjunka does.  Basically it lets you post entries to your blog with photos faster than any other software I’ve used.  Drag in the photos, type a your entry, pick post.  By default Tanjunka will resize the photos to a blog friendly size.  It always seemed to take 5 to 15 extra minutes to post anything with a photo to a blog so my goal was to get rid of that problem.  The easier it is the more likely I’l post.

Tanjunka can do basic photo editing so hopefully I won’t have to go to photoshop anymore.

I saw this post about how to put part of your moblog on a side bar on your front page using PHP. Getting PHP to run can be trouble for some or your ISP might not support it. I also saw this link on how to get it to work using some MT plugin. That’s of course an MT specific solution and it has the disadvantage that the bar doesn’t update automatically.

Well, here’s a way to get it to both update automatically and not require PHP or any plugs.

That is to have your blog generate a javascript page generator page for you (that’s a mouth full) and then put a short javascript link on your main page. This is how blogrolling.com works for example.

In your moblog make a new index template and set the output file to “mobar.js”

Set the Template Body to something like this

mymobar('Moblog'+<MTEntries lastn="3">"<$MTEntryTitle encode_js="1"$>"+"Posted: <$MTEntryDate encode_js="1"$>"+"<$MTEntryBody encode_js="1"$>"+"<a href=\"<$MTEntryPermalink$>\" target=_blank name=\"comments\">Comments</a> | <a href=\"<$MTBlogURL$>\" target=_blank>View all</a>"+</MTEntries>'') ;

function mymobar( s ) {  document.write( s );}

rebuild

Now go to your main blog and edit the template for your front page. In the spot you want your mobar to appear put in this line

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://yourblock.com/moblog/mobar.js"></script>

Now, if you didn’t make any typos and you fixed (http://yourblog.com/moblog/mobar.js”) to point to the mobar.js on your site you should have a live mobar on your blog.

If you want to modify it, the important parts are that each line in your template that generates text needs to have quotes around it and it needs to end with a + sign. In top of that you need to add encode_js=”1″ to tell movabletype to adjust anything it outputs to work with Javascript. And on top of that you need to make sure any quotes you use are escaped with a backslash \ , like for example the links HTML in the example above. If you make a mistake the browsers will not display anything where you expected your sidebar to appear and you’ll get a javascript error. It can be a pain to debug if you are not used to alll that but once you get it correct it should work fine.

This method will work with almost any blogging system. It will even work across servers. For example it’s what I use to get the headlines from game-science.com to appear on the tokyopia.com front page on the right bar. The game-science people put in a template to generate a javascript file that outputs their headlines and then I just put the one line javascript on our site to use their headlines.

The only issue is the browser viewing the page must support Javascript but half the stuff on the web requires javascript now-a-days so I suspect that’s not a big problem.

It also lets you present your bookmarks as blog entries if you want, giving a comment to each one and allowing others to comment as well.

It’s even got importing and exporting to and from IE and Mozilla.

I’m not sure what the original intent was, blog tool, bookmark tool or what but either way it’s pretty cool.