Unfortunately my GMail account martin [dot] mcdowell got somehow hacked today and someone (or something) in China sent a spam message to all my 119 e-mail contacts in my address book at 15.35 this afternoon. The IP address the hack originated from was 115.52.213.93 and is assigned to the Chinese ISP CNC Group CHINA169.

It looks like there was a Google-wide attack as their systems crashed. There are several reports of hacked accounts on Google forums. The message was just a spam and did not contain any viruses or worms in itself.

Subject: How are you doing,my dear friend?

How are you doing,my dear friend?

I am really happy now because i got my new iphone.haha…

I really want an iphone,you know that,right?

And i just found a cool place to buy it with a cheaper price.

<www.newelecn.com>

Hope you can have a look.

Have a nice day and best regards!

For what its worth I have reported the matter to the police and I have also got in touch with the attacker’s internet service provider China 169. Unfortunately I have no suggestions, other than change your password regularly, on how anybody else should avoid this specific attack as I am convinced that both my computers are clean, one of them is even a GNU/Linux machine! I take security quite seriously but I do apologize to anyone who received this spam from my e-mail account.

Here is what I saw when I tried to access Google calendar about the time of the attack:

Update 24 November 2010

The one thing that angered me was that Google has a unusual activity detection system and even though I was on GMail at the time of the attack I saw no warnings. In fact the only warning I received as about 7h later at about 10pm. The original access table said the Chinese access came from a browser, now it says its ‘Unknown’.

After many problems that I had with the previous hosting provider Bluehost I have finally decided to uproot this blog and move to another provider. Instead of using a provider in the U.S. I have opted for somebody local, not just locally in Europe, but actually in the UK. The infrastructure they seem to be using is part of the BlueConnex system that has data-centres all over the country, mine in particular is in BlueSquare and located just down the road right next to the M4.

The speeds from where I am are much better and as most of my traffic comes from withing Europe it should improve speeds for most of my visitors. The back-end WordPress admin pages certainly load MUCH MUCH faster then before. Don’t get me wrong, I think Bluehost is an excellent host provider, very cheap with lots of features. However I think they seem a bit to big for their shoes. I have heard admins having problems with speeds of their DNS servers but it is also the fact of internet latency – the signal has to come all the way cross the Atlantic and that does not help the whole speed issue. I tried pinging their server box450 where my website was located from home, my work and from Slovenia and was getting poor responses all the time. The Bluehost support was also not helpful in this respect as they kept blaming my ISP. It clearly wasn’t a problem, possibly could be down to their ISP and the way it was routing traffic across the Atlantic to Europe.

Please give me your feedback on any technical problems through my contact page.

When I looked up my GMail account this morn morning I saw that they activated the GMail phone feature for me and so far it is looking much better than Skype. These are the per minute call rates to a landline to Slovenia.

Skype (PAYG): 0.041 GBP/min

Google Voice: 0.026 GBP/min

Prices above include VAT and were taken from the Google and Skype websites on 27. August 2010.

Limitation with Google Voice at the moment is that they let you add funds to your account only by $10 ONLY exactly.

Just had a nasty surprise about my Olympus µ700 compact camera I bought 3 years ago from Pixmania and cost me about £164.

Last year it started to bleach/overexpose all outdoor photos. Defaulting to factory settings did not work. I finally called the Olympus UK support line this morning  and they told me that for that model they charge £90.77!!! to repair any kind of fault. Does not make any sense at all. That is just over £73 less than the price for when it was new.

Sort of reminds me of the story of inkjet printers with their high repair costs and overpriced ink cartridge prices.

Update April 2011

After contemplating what to do with it I threw it in the trash at our local recycle centre.

External links:

• Olympus µ700 on Wikipedia
• Olympus µ700 on the Olympus website

Taken from Google StreetView

Google StreetView’s coverage has been extended to about 90% of the country and that now includes Haverfordwest and Pembrokeshire. The images are pretty high quality. I have heard there is a bit of an anomaly with the High Street in Pembroke Dock as part of it was filmed in once season and the other part in another, with Christmas decorations still visible.

Taken from Google StreetView

As I did and most of the people I showed this to, also did, we went and had a look where we live and where we used to live. So go on, knock yourself out.

http://maps.google.co.uk/

Logic dictates that an e-book should be cheaper than its paper counterpart, yes? One of the main reasons why people should buy e-book readers is the fact that you don’t have to pay for the overpriced printing and hopefully can save a few trees at the same time. OK, lets ignore the fact that a lot of books are already made from recycled paper and that making an e-book reader creates a marked size number 11 carbon footprint of its own.

This was why it was very surprising that I found an e-book on Waterstone’s website that was more expensive than the printed version.

As you can see the cheapest paperback edition is £4.79 and the e-book edition is £6.25. This screen capture was taken after calling the following URL.

I have looked around the website and could not find this repeated again. I would welcome anybody else’s feedback. Has someone found the same anomaly?

I did contact Waterstones and this is what they said:

Dear Martin,

Thank you for your email.

I am sorry to hear that you are unhappy with the price difference between Waterstones.com and our High Street stores.

There are a number of reasons that there are different prices online to instore. Firstly there is the difference in overheads, and secondly there are the negotiations that take place through Waterstones.com . We have a buyer who negotiates different special deals and promotions for the site outside of those negotiated for the high street. All our books are sourced from one third party distribution centre, which in itself allows reductions in price that are not always seen in the high street stores. We also compete in an online environment that is very different to that of the high street.

That said I appreciate that sometimes this can be a confusing message when coming from the same company so please accept my apologies for any disappointment or confusion caused.

Kind regards,

[name witheld by blog author]
Customer Service Team
Waterstones.com

Fair enough. I hope this will not be a common discrepancy, otherwise I cannot see myself getting the currently overpriced e-book reader that are marked at about £200.

The surprising thing for me here is that Vista came in third. In other boot speed tests I have read about it usually cam in dead last, with Windows 7 being faster, but not faster than any of the two Ubuntus.

Speed test courtesy of Tuxradar.