DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Today’s Tech Tip: the top of the subwoofer is not a good place for the CD-ROM burner.

Thanks to Network Solutions providing my name and address to every spammer and con artist on the Internet for the past five years, I’ve received over a half-dozen copies of the “internet business guide” invoice scam from utp-online.com.

The mailing is from Switzerland, and it arrives in a glassine-window envelope (as might a real invoice). My name and address show through the window. Inside the envelope is something that looks a lot like an invoice. The billed amount is $960.

It’s an interesting scam. Presumably some companies are large or disorganized enough that these fake invoices are inadvertently paid. But if there is anyone with half a brain at UTP, they should realize that this scam is only likely to work with the first copy of the invoice. To say that another way: if I was smart enough to recognize this as a despicable hoax when I received the first copy, why on earth do you think I’d pay the sixth? Please.

Here’s more on the UTP-Online.com pro-forma invoice scam

Heh, I just wish UTP was sending out prepaid reply envelopes with their invoices.

In case you haven’t already seen it (via Slashdot or Camworld or, no doubt, countless other places): check out Steve Gibson’s dissection of a distributed denial-of-service attack against grc.com. It’s long, but fascinating to read — reminiscent of Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg, a 1980s techno-thriller about tracking an international spy ring.

Even if the content doesn’t interest you, you should probably go to grc.com anyway to run Steve’s ShieldsUP! program, which does some simple testing to see how vulnerable your Windows machine is to a network-based attack.

Workstation security is particular important if you’re a broadband user. Folks with cable modems and DSL are favorite targets for the IRC bots described in the article above. Windows users are more vulnerable than anyone else.

Don’t let Bush and Cheney lie to you — conservation is a very real means to an end. I always thought I was pretty energy conscious, but even so I was able to easily carve a substantial chunk out of my electric bill.

This graph shows my total KWh usage (top line) versus PG&E’s “baseline” usage (bottom line) for the past five months. My lifestyle has not changed dramatically… I am not living in the dark or eating from styrofoam plates. I simply replaced a dozen incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, and became more vigilant about turning off unused devices, including computers. The result is visible: nearly a 40% drop in total KWh consumed.

I suspect some of this savings is due to the change in weather over the past few months. However, the whole county grew warmer, and the baseline KWh allowance did not change radically. This tends to indicate that the weather is not solely responsible for my drop in consumption, or the baseline ought to register a 40% drop as well.

PG&E’s proposed pricing changes impose penalties for usage over baseline, so the convergence of these two lines translates to real dollars saved. Sure, I spent some money on CF bulbs, but those are getting cheaper all the time, and I only had to buy them once.

It’s true — that camera is significantly smaller than my