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Variations on a theme: I’ve had well over 100 calls claiming to be from MS of this sort over the last couple of years, but I have also had two that were notable variations. One claimed to be from “An antivirus company” called “Symantech-Kapersky” (I had him spell it) the makers of “Norton’s Anti-virus”. The other claimed to be from the Australian Federal Police, claiming to have intercepted an email with a virus coming from my computer. I reported the latter to the police, didn’t bother with the former, it was obviously a scam. I have also had a couple of these arrive via email instead of over the phone. All things to watch out for. Always start by getting a phone number that you can call them back on “if you have any questions” and warning that your phone has been dropping out lately. Then hang up and try the number they give you if you have any suspicion that the call may be genuine.

This sometimes happens when the name of the folder includes a full stop – windows misreads the part of the folder name after the full stop as being a file extension. I have also seen the same thing sometimes occur with customized folder icons.

I wouldn’t quite go that far, Doc. Reason to be suspicious? Absolutely. Reason to automatically flag as a scam? Not necessarily. In this case, it’s the content, which is clearly not suitable for a mass mailout, in conjunction with the generic addressing, that elevates this into the “almost-certain scam” category without clicking on anything or checking any links.

The only question that this story leaves unanswered is the general question of how and why the MBR can become corrupt in the first place. It’s not like you’re writing to that part of the HD regularly, after all; this should be the last place you would expect data corruption to occur. What are the larger issues?

I wouldn’t give this article a very high rating. Not because it wasn’t interesting; on the contrary, it was fascinating – but because it felt incomplete. What was missing was context. Why critical infrastructure was located where it was. What the normal precautions were and whether or not they appeared inadequate as the forecasts worsened. What extra measures were undertaken in preperation for the storm prior to Hurricane Sandy actually touching down. Of course, the ending of the story is still being written – but that doesn’t excuse the absence of the beginning.

It’s my impression that the specific problem lies not in what the system shares with friends, but with how the system defines those “friends” in the first place. They may very well have improved security handling with referance to the former, leaving the real problem unresolved. And, in part, this problem would seem to be naturally inherant in the very purpose of “social networking”, which is all about connecting one contact with another, until we are all six degrees of seperation (or whatever) from every other registered user – whether they are a friend, lover, relative, acquantance, axe-murderer, or martian.

There are two obvious solutions: fix the over-lax criteria that the system uses to determine whether or not a contact is a friend (from a universal ‘yes’ to something more restrictive) or change the name of ‘friends’ to something less directly threatening to privacy – the “knows somebody who knows” list, for example. The latter would be relatively quick and easy and would mean that the software would continue to grow the social network at breakneck speed – so that is what I forecast will be done, if anything.