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Last year I purchased a used Dell XPS M170 laptop on eBay. I checked with Dell before bidding to ensure that the warranty was still valid and that the system had not been reported stolen. I was told the extended warranty was transferable to me. Soon after I received the laptop, Dell replaced the power brick for me. Today I requested replacement of the cooling fan, but the representative I spoke to said he couldn’t help until a hold on the account was resolved. Dell had placed a hold on all computers handled by a service technician who had requested re­placements for laptops and then sold the laptops instead of returning them to Dell. My XPS was one of those, so Dell now refuses to honor my warranty. Can you help?

Joe Hightower, Burien, Washington

OYS responds: After we contacted Dell about Hightower’s problem, the company got in touch with him directly. A couple of days later, a representative informed Hightower that Dell had decided to lift the hold on his PC-reactivating the rest of its warranty-and to reimburse him for the cooling fan he had bought.

Purchasing used equipment from an individual seller, whether on eBay, Craigs­list, or another online marketplace, is risky. To avoid a warranty dispute, we re­­commend doing as Hightower did: Get the product’s serial number from the seller be­­fore buying or bidding, and check with the manufacturer to verify that the item was purchased legitimately and that the

However, because Android is an open system and allows the ability for 3rd-party app installation (a feature that currently you have to turn on in the system Settings to enable) there’s nothing to stop premium Adult content providers, such as Playboy, Penthouse and Vivid from working with companies like MiKandi to provide quality produced erotica for mobile.

It’s also entirely possible that these companies and others could also license Mikandi’s platform (or someone else’s) to launch app stores of their own so they can control the quality or flavor of what they produce.  I can certainly see the emergence of gay and lesbian-oriented app stores, or even fetish-specialized, which are targeted towards specific audiences and tastes.

The freedoms of choice with Android would be unlimited. Want to see attractive Asian (or Russian) women (or men) dress up as nurses (or lumberjacks) and engaging in a specific act? Tagging features and “channels” will allow you to select from thousands of apps  to find exactly what you want. The very same tagging technology could be used for purposes OTHER than pornography, but it will be porn that drives the technology and the apps to the maturity level needed to do everything else that every regular Android consumer needs.

What I see occurring with Android is not unlike how other technologies were advanced by the adult industry, such as VHS tapes, DVD video, and streaming Internet multimedia and content distribution. It can be argued that NONE of these technologies would have been so heavily adopted if it wasn’t for the Adult film and content industry embracing their openness, a quality that is shared by Android and its ability to run 3rd-party content without restriction. The YouTube clips and Vimeos that you enjoy of your pets and kids doing cute and completely innocent things? You’ve got porn to thank for it

The retailers, including Priceline.com, Classmates.com, FTD.com, Shutterfly.com and Orbitz.com, were accused of working with marketers Affinion, Vertrue and Webloyalty to mislead consumers into unknowingly signing up for “affinity” or “loyalty” programs that would charge their credit card accounts.

The marketers are currently still in business. So are the retailers involved, some of which deny the extensive documentation (.pdf) aired by the U.S. Senate Commerce committee during a hearing last week that implies that the retailers willingly partnered with the marketers to allow access to their customers.

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Hosting company DreamHost is becoming a nightmare for customers. The company has had trouble keeping its customer sites up and running as it migrates to a new data center.

The problems began to appear on Sunday and are stretching almost into Thanksgiving. Customers have reported that their sites have been down for 24 hours at a clip and when there is a recovery it isn’t a reliable one.

Among the problems:

• DreamHost has been upgrading their shared hosting hardware;
• The upgrade went way wrong;
• Customer support didn’t know what was going on.

High Risk Credit Card Processing
eComTechnology is a eCommerce company with a diverse range of products and services, including a very secure and reliable multi-currency platform for credit card processing, market leading fraud minimization systems and premium support services for the sustainable future.

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Opera has shipped a new version of its browser to fix three security vulnerabilities, one rated “extremely severe.”

The most serious flaw could allow a malicious attacker to take complete control of a system, Opera said in an advisory.

Passing very long strings through the string to number conversion using JavaScript in Opera may result in heap buffer overflows. This also affects the dtoa routine, and was reported in CVE-2009-0689. In most cases Opera will just freeze or terminate, but in some cases this could lead to a crash which could be used to execute code. To inject code, additional techniques will have to be employed.

A second flaw, rated “highly severe,” could allow error messages to leak onto unrelated sites

Scripting error messages are normally available only to the page that caused the error. In some cases, the error messages could be passed to other sites as the contents of unrelated variables, and may contain sensitive information. If those sites write the content into the page markup, this could allow cross-site scripting, using code provided by the attacking site. This issue only affects installations that have enabled stacktraces for exceptions, these are disabled by default.

Opera also patched a third “moderately severe” flaw but details on this issue were not released.

Opera users should immediately upgrade to version 10.10 which includes the patches for these issues.

The US Postal Service is drowning in red ink to the tune of $3.8 billion, and now, there’s a proposal from Postmaster General John Potterto to cut Saturday deliveries. Is it in its long-term best interest to do so?

The USPS already made $5 billion in cuts, and it needs to take drastic measures. Mail volume has declined from 202.7 billion in 2008 pieces to 176 billion in 2009. With the increasing growth of electronic communications, it seems this volume will only continue to slide.

But in a 24×7 world, is this the right direction to go?

The experts who analyze postal economics are divided on the question. Seung-Hyun Hong, an economist at the University of Illinois, says projected savings from weekday-only delivery could wither “if the move chases away lucrative business customers who count on the mail to blanket homes with coupons, fliers and other advertisements.” He adds that “there needs to be more study to gauge the revenue impact if services become less frequent and less reliable,” he said. “Most residential customers probably won’t care, but some businesses might and could try switching to the Internet.”

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Transmedia Dec. 7 will launch Glide OS 4.0, a fresh version of the company’s Web operating system for computers. Glide OS 4.0 is a browser plug-in that sits in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer, allowing users to access their computer applications. Glide OS 4.0 also includes Transmedia’s collaboration apps. Glide OS 4.0 includes a search box and lets users manage their personal files, search results and other online content on their computer. Any local content and files are mirrored in the cloud.

Security researchers have stumbled upon a new piece of ransomware that blocks an infected computer from accessing the Internet until a fee is paid via SMS (text message). 

[ SEE: Blackmail ransomware returns with 1024-bit encryption key ]

According CA researcher Zarestel Ferrer, the ransomware file is bundled with a program called uFast Download Manager.  Once a machine is infected, a message is posted in Russian (see image above) demanding a ransom under the guise of activating the uFast Download Manager application.

Here is a rough English translation:

Internet access is blocked due to violation of the
license agreement schedules of uFast Download Manager
You must activate your copy

Get a registration code by sending an SMS with the following
code fw0004199 to number 7122

In response you will receive an activation message.

Enter the activation message received from the SMS response  ________

CA is offering an activation code generator for this particular ransomware variant.

Online holiday spending got off to a good start with Black Friday sales up 11 percent from a year ago, according to comScore. The big question: Will these gains stick?

The question looms large on Cyber Monday, the day the U.S. comes back from a long Thanksgiving weekend and goes shopping online on corporate networks everywhere.

Last year, sales across retail got off to a decent start, but consumers were tapped out shortly after Black Friday. Will this year be different?

ComScore figures that the holiday season thus far has generated $10.57 billion in revenue, up 3 percent from a year ago (statement). Black Friday delivered $595 million in online sales, up 11 percent from a year ago. Black Friday was the second heaviest online spending day in 2009.

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