Tech News Vermont Jack Skoda

A county in Kentucky gets robbed by computer criminals who used software to trick county computers into transferring funds into money mole bank accounts.  Those moles were people who thought they were working for a legitimate business, but later found out that they’d been scammed.
Make sure you check out any company that offers to hire you over the Internet via email, solely based on your on-line resume.  Always know who you are dealing with if you are asked to send non-reversible financial instruments (i.e.money orders) to someone.
Enhanced podcast:

A short episode this week, running through some of the tech news from last week.  There was a major outage around Washington and Rutland counties due to a fiber line that was blasted by a shotgun.   Fairpoint may go into bankruptcy, but not to worry there are alternative ISPs in Vermont and Fairpoint won’t just shrivel up and blow away, they’ll be provide service while they restructure.
Gov Douglas has said that there is stimulus money flowing into Vermont to help expand our broadband connectivity.  That’s great news.
Have a great 4th!

Enhanced podcast:

Send ideas for the poll question to feedback@technewsvt.com.
For people interested in the Commodore 64.  I’d recommend the wikipedia entry as a great starting place to find out all about one of the first truly mass market personal computers.

Enhanced podcast:

The first few days with the iPhone 3.0 software has been fairly good.  I lost my contacts and calendars when I tried to turn on Push, but I restored them from backup.  I still don’t fully understand the relationship between the Mac applications, .mac (or as it’s know now-a-days MobileMe *ick*) and the iPhone.
I mentioned the Wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/  It’s a great place to go for a trip down memory lane on the Internet.
Gibson Research is in the blog roll and I’d encourage anyone with a Windows XP computer to look in your Firefox extensions for the .NET extension.  There is a way to remove it (even though the uninstall button is greyed out.)  Here’s a a great How to Remove article: How To Remove Microsoft .NET Spyware Extension
Don’t forget that you too can be part of the show, just click the About button and use one of those methods to send me information for a subsequent show.

Enhanced Podcast:

I didn’t change the episode tag at the front of the podcast, I know it says episode 4 then after the music I start into episode 5…. Sorry for the confusion, this is really episode five.
Don’t forget to check out www.vtsda.org.  The Vermont Software Developers Alliance is hosting a lunch and learn on the 17th.

Enhanced version:

After a long break the podcasts are back.  I received an email from Verizon about some comments that were posted on the Concord Monitor’s web site.  I cover some of the hightlights from E3 and talk about the troubles with Conficker seen in certain hospitals.  Short show this week, working on getting back into a regular groove.