The Weekly Geek

The waitress in the story below must have thought she did one heck of a job if she felt she “deserved” $5,000 in tips. Ladies and Gentlemen, if you dont’ have credit protection (and not from your credit card company), you should get it, you should also make sure your business takes credit cards from a reputable processor who will help you if an employee becomes scum.

Even though this story is not “local”, it does happen locally, it has happened twice to me over the years. Fortunantly both restaurants went out of business quickly.

Every time a credit card leaves the hands of a patron, an opportunity for ID theft and credit card fraud is created. CATS eliminates the tableside security gap by allowing patrons to swipe their credit card right at the table.

A woman of Port Richey, Florida was arrested along with two others in connection to a credit card skimming scheme.

Kathryn Shana’e Perez, 25, who worked at an eatery known as Mugs N Jugs, used the credit card skimmer from May 30th to June 23rd on at least nine different customers. The skimmer used by Perez was given to her by her cousin, Brandon Quillen, 25, who used the stolen information to make new credit cards. Quillen then gave the new cards to his ex-girlfriend to make purchases at Radio Shack and Walmart, totaling over $5,000 in merchandise. Perez told Pasco County Sheriff’s Office detective John Suess that the customers whose information she stole deserved it because they were bad tippers. All three have been arrested and face multiple charges, including fraudulent use of a credit card.

So Saturday I get a strange email from my wife’s Yahoo account. One of those “Hello” in the subject and “I thought you would enjoy this link” messages. I immediately knew it was crapware.

My wife has a netbook that she takes around and uses on open (free) wireless networks wherever she is. She also does not turn it off but rather just closes the lid. Apparently while opening an email (she is a couponer so she opens any and all emails) her machine became infected. Even though I have talked to her about the dangers her attitude is “I have got your to fix it if something happens”, my issue with that is about four times a year I am cleaning a big mess of the laptop, and this time the infection allowed the hackers software to have access to and harvest our Yahoo email password. [Read more →]

Microsoft decided to add a helpful though not fully robust program called “Action Center” to assist users with computer issues.

To get to the Action Center, click on the “Start” button which is the Windows symbol in the lower left of your monitor.
In the “Search Programs and Files” box immediately above the Start button type in “Action Center” without the quotes. Now select “ACtion Center” from the list on the pop up window, it will be at the top, under the heading “Control Center”

After a moment the Action Center opens up. Listed here will be any known and possible some unknown issues with Windows 7. [Read more →]

Today’s cameras come with two listed zooms, Optical and Digital, I will attempt to explain in short order the difference between the two.

An Optical lens is just like binoculars, you truly zoom from where you are to where the subject of your picture is. The higher the optical zoom the closer you can get to the subject matter. This is  great for sports and nature shots where you cannot be right on the space of a Grizzly bear or down on the baseball diamond. The quality of the picture taken no matter what the zoom is will be the same. If you blow up an image taken via optical zoom, it remains a quality picture (to a certain point). [Read more →]

In the previous Weekly Geek article we talked about how to cleanup from a malware infection. This week I want to go over the general details of preventing one in the first place.

1. Run Windows updates (using a modern operating system such as Windows 7), all of the critical ones including Office updates but none of the hardware ones offered by Microsoft.

2. Hardware updates, video card, NIC, motherboard drivers, get them from the manufacturers. If you own a Dell go to Dell, if you built your computer or it was built by a local company, find the motherboard name and go to their site, same with any add-on cards like video cards. Don’t forget the motherboard BIOS updates too. [Read more →]