The Lady Programmer

A US court sentenced a spammer to serve 30 months to prison, according to vnunet.com. Adam Vitale, the spammer with a long history of convictions, sent around 250,000 spam messages to 1.2 million AOL subscribers. He had worked with Todd Moeller to help him change the email headers and use multiple computers for the attack.

photo credit: yanyan92 (SXC)

The law enforcement officials still caught up to his act. He was caught through a sting operation where he unknowingly hired these officials to do spam just to promote a new security product. Aside from the 30 month prison sentence, he is required to pay $180,000 fine to AOL. His accomplice, Todd Moeller, gets 27 months to prison.

If the spammers and the crime happened in the Philippines, these criminals might have been escaped conviction. I still think the 30 month prison duty is not enough for them to learn their lessons well.

My recent penchant with the wonders of Windows Vista is something to behold. Unlike the time when it was first introduced in the market, many older hardware and software are not truly prepared for the ultimate functionality of this new operating system. It is a fact that many users still stick to the old Windows XP (I’m relieved that I don’t see Windows 98 anymore).

The cycle of introducing new software in the market just repeats over and over whenever Microsoft gets to release a new operating system to the world. There are still many who are comfortable using older hardware and software. Numerous negative write-ups about the new software would come out. This happened during the transition from Windows 98 to Windows XP software. But the IT industry truly demanding so it has to work at a very dynamic pace; eventually older technology gives way to improvements in computing. Now, I’ve noticed a lot of notebooks sold in computer stores with a version of Windows Vista software. I have to admit I still like Windows a lot better than using Linux technologies primarily because of software compatibility, better customer support and ease of use.

One of the first things noticeable with Windows Vista is its Aero look. Windows Vista takes advantage of the 64-bit technology in the form of hardware stuff. I am pretty much sure that once that the hardware and software catches up, I would surely see that the general public would be keen to trading in their Windows XP to the new feel and look, convenience and better security of this new operating system.

I just came across an article on Yahoo News and a very useful website on DoxPara Research about a secret mission that was collaborated by the software giants Microsoft, Sun and Cisco. The secret mission is all about a DNS vulnerability where hackers can gain world control – at least through the world wide web channel. Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher of IOActive, stumbled on this vulnerability a few months ago by accident and decided seek the help of these software giants to resolve this problem.

photo credit: nwogen (SXC)

Hackers can discover this vulnerability and take advantage of this. Basically, the user is fooled into providing personal information to phishing sites, instead of the real site that they have relied on. Phishing sites mimics the content and appearance of the real site.

To see if your computer is open to this vulnerability, DoxPara Research offers an online DNS checker that can check whether your computer is vulnerable to this DNS cache poisoning.

The secret patch was developed in secret for several months by major software and hardware companies. Microsoft has already released their patch recently among their Windows updates.

I’m sure Mozilla Firefox 3 is a hot download right now. It got over a million pledges already when I signed up a few days back. Now the guys behind Firefox are now inviting everyone to make this as the most downloaded software in 24 hours.

Here is a link to this awaited download, the file is more than 7 MB:

ftp://mozilla.isc.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/win32/en-US/Firefox Setup 3.0.exe

Are you using a Mozilla Firefox? I am a huge fan of as I go about my programming projects. I just received in my email that there will be a new version (Firefox 3) that will be out on June 17, 2008. As I am writing this post, there are already 1,280,362 pledges including myself to set out a Guinness World Record of becoming the most downloaded software in 24 hours!

The Mozilla blog briefly mentions all about this huge countdown. The button provided below should take you to the PLEDGE NOW page.