Dreaded e-mail

I got one of those dreaded e-mails this afternoon:

This is a courtesy notice to let you know that your eBay password has been changed. No response is needed!

I think a response IS NEEDED!

Here's a screen shot of the e-mail:

Notice the little gold key at the top left. This is Gmail verifying that the e-mail did actually come from eBay. That's about the last good thing in the e-mail. The e-mail is html so the link for you to go to "if you did not make this change" isn't simple text so the underlying link could be anything. Thankfully it is consistent but why make me worry? Next there is no way to navigate to the eBay location without using that link. In other words, you can't just type ebay.com in the URL field and navigate independently of the e-mail. That is Rule One of links in e-mails: Ignore them and type them yourself. Remember the IP address in the e-mail. We'll look at that in a minute.

So off I went.

Look at the site information that Chrome presented from that link:

The identity of this website has not been identified.

Your connection to ocs.ebay.com is not encrypted.

Site Information:
You have never visited this site before today.

None of that made me feel very good.

For comparison here's what eBay looks like when I login:

Much more comfortable. That's what I'd like to see when I think my password has been hacked.

I followed the links and called eBay. I was on hold less than a minute. The agent e-mailed me a link to reset my password.

That was a plain text e-mail. Much better.

I did that and all was fine.

Here's the e-mail I got from eBay that I'd changed my password:

html again. Interesting how different that is than the fraudulent one. Why?

Now let's step back some.

That first e-mail had the IP address that changed my password: 68.160.170.79 WhatIsMyIPAddress.com does a good lookup on it. It was from a Verizon broadband customer in the Boston area. Nope, I haven't been to Boston lately.

Interestingly when I did get logged in to eBay, I could tell that the hacker had actually used my account.

Yeah, I know how to spell "Ford Explorer" and I'm not looking for a '79 Trans Am parts car. I did have a '79 Trans Am once and parts are all it's good for.

Well, that was an exciting afternoon but seems that all is well.

DSL Bandwidth

I've blogged about DSL before and about bandwidth before but never about DSL bandwidth so here goes.

There are always rumblings about bandwidth caps among the carriers, both landline and wireless. While I'm not a huge user of bandwidth that got me interested in what I was using.

Fortunately I'm using dd-wrt in my home router. One of the administration screens shows you the WAN bandwidth over time. Here's what one month's looks like.

I've been capturing this month by month and graphing this.

So I'm just below 3 Gb down per month. That spike back in the summer of 2011 is the month before my TechNet subscription lapsed.

I'm not sure that this is actionable right now but is interesting nevertheless.

Another iSecret

I talked about my descent into Appleland. I have to admit that I've continued that descent. A co-worker of mine just had to have a "new iPad." He had a practically new iPad 2 that I took off his hands. Do you think I might buy a Mac next?

I did a factory reset on the iPad 2 and restored my wife's iPhone 4 from iTunes. That worked fine.

One thing I can't figure out is how to synchronize the Camera Rolls between the iPhone and the iPad. I turned on iCloud for the Photo Stream but that didn't do it. I'll keep looking.

I was looking for the Logitech Zagg case but started with an Acase. It works like Apple's Smart Cover.

Then I found the Logitech case on 1SaleADay for $20 and jumped on it.

I'm still searching for the Holy Grail of using a tablet to take notes in a business setting. I tried a Bluetooth keyboard on my TouchPad. Close but no cigar.

I tried a Google search and turned up the MyScript Memo app.

I had picked up a stylus on sale at BestBuy so I was ready.

The ability of MyScript to recognize handwriting is amazing. Even my wife can't read my handwriting but MyScript does. The app as downloaded from iTunes is really just a demo app as you can't save the recognized text. There's an in-app purchase for $2.99 to enable all the features.

Here's my handwriting.

The gray area below the handwriting is a movable palm shield.

Here's the recognized text.

Then I selected to send the text via e-mail.

There are a couple of issues. You only have that one screen to write on. Then you have to create another "note." Takes 2 taps. Also the formatting is severely limited which isn't a big deal except that you either can specify that there is a carriage return at the end of each line or there are no carriage returns.

I've Got a Secret

I've been keeping a secret. I bought an iPhone. Actually I bought my wife an iPhone. She loved her BlackBerry Curve but when Google announced late 2011 that they were dropping support for Gmail on BlackBerry I started looking for alternatives for her. To be clear, Google didn't kill Gmail support on BlackBerry but "deprecated" Gmail support. The scary part for me was that you would no longer be able to download a fresh copy should you have to rebuild the phone. I realize there are alternatives for that but still the handwriting was on the wall.

AT&T had a refurbished white iPhone 4 on sale Black Friday weekend for $49.95. I ordered her one. I was worried about her adapting to the soft keyboard after the Curve's hardware keyboard but that hasn't been a problem.

I had seen the handwriting on the wall for the BlackBerry for a while and had migrated her to the web-based Gmail interface. That made it easy to use the Exchange Active Sync protocol to connect the iPhone to her Gmail e-mail. I found Google's instructions here. Be sure to follow the "Next..." link at the bottom for Calendar support.

The Google support has been seamless. Push e-mail and push calendar are incredible. I share my calendar with her so she can see where I am.

She isn't big into taking pictures with her iPhone (yet) but what she does love is the Camera Roll. She gets lots of e-mails with pictures of our granddaughter and she saves them to the Camera Roll.

She likes to listen to the radio while she gets ready in the mornings. The AM/FM radio I had in the bathroom didn't have a good antenna. I got her a Jensen Docking Speaker System. It is compact, has stereo speakers and charges the iPhone. It actually has an FM receiver built-in but I didn't use that. There's an iTunes app that we don't use but you need it as the phone complains if it is not present when you place the phone in the dock. The app runs the radio built into the dock and presents a clock. I wanted to stream her favorite FM station over the Wi-Fi. After a couple of false starts I ended up with TimeTuner. It presents a nice clock and has 4 presets for streaming Internet radio stations. That has been a perfect solution for her.

We converted her 200MB BlackBerry data plan to an iPhone data plan. She's been running around 35MB per month as she uses Wi-Fi at all our family's houses. This is about twice as much data as her BlackBerry. With iMessage handling text messages among the other iPhones in the family she's been well within her 200 text message plan. She's actually using less text messages due to iMessage.

Last week she said "I love my iPhone." 'nuff said.

DSL Upload Speed

I don't think I can explain this. The best I can do is show you what I did and the results.

Ok, if you don't have DSL I think you can quit reading. But I'm not sure so maybe you want to read on. I don't know.

I have AT&T's "FastAccess DSL XTREME 6.0." This is advertised as 6.0 Mbps down and 512 Kbps up.

AT&T actually does pretty well delivering this.

Except when I'm doing massive uploads. Understandably the uploads are limited by the upload speed but what I've been experiencing as long as I can remember is that when I'm uploading the download speed drops to dial-up. Consequently I end up queueing up big uploads for overnight.

Until October 2011 I thought this was something that just affected me and I wasn't willing to arm wrestle AT&T to work on this. Then when we were in Italy I had the same experience. The "hotel" I stayed at in Manarola had DSL. Their download speed was over 10 Mbps but when I uploaded my pictures the whole Wi-Fi network slowed to a crawl. The good news is there were only 4 rooms in the "hotel" so I didn't really impact anyone else.

Hmmm. The problem I was seeing must be a general DSL problem, not just something in my configuration. So I went off and Googled it.

I found this article.

You should expect download speeds to be very seriously impacted by any file uploads that you may be undertaking at the same time. This is a normal consequence of the design of ADSL services.

Read the whole article. There's lots more that I didn't understand.

So I wrote it off as a DSL phenomenon and started thinking about cable Internet. But cable Internet is more expensive and, as you know, I'm cheap. So I didn't do anything.

Fast forward to March 2012. I listen to Steve Gibson's Security Now podcast on TWiT. His show on March 14, 2012 was entitled "Buffer Bloat." The best I can explain this is that modern network devices with large buffers defeat TCP's built-in self-pacing capabilities. It was pretty much over my head and it didn't seem that I could do anything about it anyway.

A month later Steve had a question and answer edition. A listener had written in how he had used his router's QoS settings to manage the "Buffer Bloat" upstream from him. You can watch the question and answer here.

So I went into my router and found the QoS settings. I enabled them and set the uplink speed to 350 Kbps, just less than my observed upload speed.

Problem solved.

Browser Share

Tom's Hardware had a recent article on the futures of the various browsers. In summary the author predicted that Firefox would rise again after overcoming some of its recent problems. He calls 2011 "...A catastrophic year for Firefox." I agree.

Perhaps I hadn't been watching closely enough but what surprised me was the ongoing precipitous drop for Internet Explorer as shown in this chart.

The data comes from StatCounter. Maybe there's an agenda there but I'm not aware of it. Tom's Hardware doesn't seem to have a dog in the fight. The author says "take any market share predictions with a grain of salt."

Patch Tuesday

PCs I applied Microsoft patches to on 04/10/12:

1. T420s
   
2.   XP VM
   
3. T61
   
4. Server
   
5.   XP VM
   
6.   Windows 8 VM
   
7. T43
   
8. X40
   
9. X100e
   
10.   XP VM
    
11. Byhalia
    

Lumia 900 Data Bug

I started to write a blog post today accusing Nokia of falsely reporting a problem with data on their Lumia 900 in order to offer a $100 rebate effectively making the phone free. That isn't true and I'm glad I didn't post it. If you know me, I'm not opposed to free. It just worries me to think that Microsoft/Nokia would have to make a well respected piece of hardware free in order to push the operating system.

I had the original blog post almost written. The premise was that I couldn't find any user reports of the data bug before the rebate was announced.

Finally I stumbled across the problem reports in a Windows Phone specific forum.

In retrospect I think that the problem with me not finding anything with Google was that there were not enough of the Lumia 900s sold to create enough Google "juice" to get the articles on the problem high in the search results.

On the same topic, ZDNet reported that Windows Phone's market share is dropping an average of 1% per month. In that Windows Phone is at less than 4% that doesn't look good. For the time being Windows Phone is still leading Symbian.

This doesn't look good for Windows Phone. I hope Microsoft and Nokia get their act together as we need an alternative to iOS and Android.

Update: Now you can make $80 by buying a Lumia 900 at Target.