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Diyah Patimah
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White iPhone 4G
White iPhone 4G Pre Order was not available in the Apple Store today, just as I expected in my iPhone 4G Pre Order post. When Apple launched the iPhone 4 Pre Order site, only the Black iPhone 4 was available for pre order. Next to the White iPhone 4, Apple wrote that the White iPhone 4 is currently unavailable for pre-order or in-store pickup.
I tried to pre order the Black iPhone 4G but kept getting a “We’re sorry, but there was an error processing your request”. I had to wait 20 minute for an Apple Support representative on live chat. An Apple representative told me that the system was having problems and I’d have to try later. I went to AT&T and Apple’s site, but neither was able to let me Pre Order iPhone 4G.
Were you able to successfully pre order iPhone 4G from Apple or AT & T today? Share your story with us in the comments, I searched on Twitter and noticed that many other people were having problems with pre ordering as well. I hope Apple fixes their problems soon, I really don’t want to wait in line to get an iPhone 4G.
Cyberthieves rely on human foot soldiers
Sitting at computer somewhere overseas in January 2009, computer hackers went phishing.
Within minutes of casting their electronic bait they caught what they were looking for: A small Michigan company where an employee unwittingly clicked on an official looking email that secretly gave cyberthieves the keys to the firm’s bank account.
Before company executives knew what was happening, Experi-Metal Inc., a suburban Detroit manufacturing company, was broke. Its US$560,000 bank balance had been electronically scattered into bank accounts in Russia, Eastonia, Scotland, Finland and around the US.
In August, the Catholic Diocese in Des Moines, Iowa, lost about $680,000 over two days.
The diocese and the Detroit company were among dozens of individuals, businesses and municipalities around the country victimized by one of the largest cybertheft rings the FBI has uncovered.
In September, the bureau and its counterparts in Ukraine, the Netherlands and Britain took down the ring they first got wind of in May 2009 when a financial services firm tipped the bureau’s Omaha, Nebraska, office to suspicious transactions. Since then, the FBI’s Operation Trident Breach has uncovered losses of$14 million and counting.
Overall in the last two years, the FBI has opened 390 cases against schemes that prey on businesses that process payments electronically through the Automated Clearinghouse, which handles 3,000 transactions every five seconds. In these cases, bureau agents have uncovered thefts totaling $220 million and actual losses of $70 million.
But the court records of Operation Trident Breach reveal a surprise: For all the high-tech tools and tactics employed in these computer crimes, platoons of low-level human foot soldiers, known as “money mules”, are the indispensable cogs in the cybercriminals’ money machine.
A dozen FBI criminal complaints filed in New York provide an inside look at how this cybertheft ring worked: Operation from Eastern Europe and other overseas locations, the thieves used malicious software, known as malware, to infect the computers of unsuspecting users in the United States by email.
The malware-infected emails were written to look like they come from company manager or colleague who might send an email message to everyone in company, such as the head of human resources.
When the email recipient clicked on an embedded link to a website or opened an attachment, a Trojan horse virus called Zeus installed itself and gathered usernames, password and financial accounts numbers typed by victims on their own computer. The hackers then used this information to move the victims’money electronically into bank accounts set up in the United States by money mules.
ASKING A LOT FOR AN IPOD DOCK
Bang & Olufsen has a proud tradition of high-design audio equipment. But there is another tradition at B & O : charging large amounts of money for fairly ordinary consumer products. The latest example is BeoSound 8, an iPad/iPod/iPhone docking stations that costs $1,000. You do get a wider effective range than some of the competition offers – the BeoSound 8’s speakers work from 38.3 to 24,000 Hz, compared with Bowers & Wilkins’s range of 47 to 22,000 Hz, but only an in-person sound test can say if that really matters to you. The BeoSound 8 is certainly attractive and is one of the few speaker docks that can fit an iPad without adapters, but asking people to pay $400 more than the next most-expensive docks seems a bit much.
A NEW FLOOR-CLEANING AID
There is a new contender in the robot-floor-cleaner sweepstakes. Evolution Robotic’s Mint combines a floor washer and dry sweeper in one device. The intriguing part of the Mint is its homing capabilities. You place a cube-like sensor on a table in the room you are about to clean. The cube sends out a signal that tells the Mint where it has already been and where the drop-off points are, like ledges and stairs. The Mint is quiet, attractively designed and apparently well constructed. The instruction book is well-written, comprehensible and short. Almost everything it said it would do, it did. The “almost” comes in because when the Mint was placed in a room about 400 square feet, or 35 square meters, in area, it never seemed to find about one-third of the room.
A TABLET THAT MEANS BUSINESS
Consumers interested in buying a tablet computer are going to see plenty of devices in the coming months. A case in point is Hewlett-Packard’s Slate 500 Tablet PC. It runs full-fledged desktop software, not a smartphone version of an operating system. H.P.’s tablet is priced at $800, $100 more than the top-of-the-line Wi-Fi iPad. Hewlett-Packard said the tablet was designed primarily for business. If you are a retailer who keeps inventory on Windows program, you will be able to check what is in the back from your tablet. But it is also probably for people who do not want to leave any of the functionality of their Windows desktop behind when they are on the go.
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