Фиктивная сеть банкоматов

[en]

Second largest Ukrainian bank finds profitable to build a network of ATM guideboards, not real ATM's. Each such post gives a solid impression of an ATM situated nearby while the ratio of posts to ATM's is 5:1 actually.

[ru]

Если вам нужно открыть платёжную или кредитную карту с максимально широкой сетью банкоматов, логично посмотреть на крупнейший банк. Или, если считать, что первый банк – всегда не в меру заевшийся, можно пойти во второй.

Райффайзен Банк Аваль – второй украинский банк почти по всем “виртуальным” параметрам (активы, балансовый капитал, обязательства и т.п.)

Также Авалю удалось создать невероятно благоприятный имидж в смысле размера сети банкоматов с помощью таких вот стендов по всему городу:


Скромная стрелочка указывает на дом. Доверчивый прохожий так и подумает: “В этом доме есть банкомат Аваль. Я тут часто бываю, значит это хороший банк для меня”. Особенно легко так подумать если в доме действительно работает банкомат какого-нибудь банка – ведь издали не видно какого, а адрес рекламируемого на стенде банкомата написан мелким шрифтом.
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“King’s Capital” как схема Понзи

[en]

A new Ponzi scheme seems to be unwinding yet again in Eastern Europe. "King's Capital" in Kiev, Ukraine offers "modest" 42% annual percentage yield. This kind of modesty warrants longer than average life expectancy for the scheme.

[ru]

“King’s Capital” – не пирамида, как утверждают многие. Финансовая пирамида основывается на том же принципе – неверие в экономические реалии, однако система “King’s Capital” больше похожа на схему Понзи:
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Фишинг на фишеров

Проведённая недавно инфильтрация фишинговых сетей показала примечательный факт: большинство фишеров – неопытные веб-хулиганы, простаки, которые

  1. покупают за деньги на фишинговых форумах т.н. фишинг-кит (набор инструментов для фишинга) в виде zip архива,
  2. меняют одну-единственную строчку – подставляют свой адрес эл. почты, и
  3. загружают на веб сайт (который можно купить у провайдера легально или так же как и с китом – купить доступ к чужому).

Мифы о крутых хакерах, устраивающих фишинг-атаки и ворующих персональную информацию у честных граждан – не более, чем мифы.

Это только вершина айсберга.
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city.com.ua – город электроники или г. Чернигов?

city.com.ua - Город электроникиCircuit City logoМногие бренды, выходящие в интернет сейчас, вынуждены покупать доменные имена на вторичном рынке, т.к. всё давно застолбили сквоттеры. Но даже если такой домен мог быть достаточно раскрученным своим предыдущим владельцем, новый должен, по-моему, отнестись к дальнейшему продвижению серьёзно.

У вебмастера city.com.ua своё мнение на этот счёт.
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Авторские права и интернетизация

Попала в руки книга. Вроде ничего особенного, обычная книга доинтернетной эры. Но читаю, читаю и чувствую, что-то не так. Посмотрел внимательнее и понял – да это же прямо блог распечатанный!
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Opera Mini gets aLL Google only dreams about

Google strives to acquire user data. All those services – Gmail, Earth, Maps, … you name ‘em – are geared to harvest personal behavioral information to “better serve ads to the customers”. G doesn’t even hide its intentions and directly states them in ToS (Terms of Service) pages.
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Does Google really look at text vs. bg colors?

Very long ago I heard a tale (perhaps from Google itself) about how bad (and dangerous from SEO / SE banning point of view) it is to use extremely low contrast text, i.e. bright yellow text on white background or dark-brown on black. It went like you could be banned from the search engine index immediately for that kind of stunt.

It is pretty clear – by this deceptive tactic you could hide irrelevant keywords from human visitors and present them with some unwanted content of your choice. At the same time those keywords presumably are indexed by search engines making your pages findable by wider audience.
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Как получить доступ к чужому мобильному контракту

Когда-то на каком-то форуме вычитал трюк: как узнать фамилию владельца контрактного мобильного номера UMC. Метод простой, действенный и универсальный (подтверждено на Голден Телеком).

Ну а возможности, открывающиеся у злоумышленника после выяснения персональных данных контракта, очевидны.

Например, сотрудники Киевстар GSM, рады сообщить первому встречному, позвонившему с любого телефона по номеру 044-466-0-466 практически всё о конкретном контрактном подключении, если только позвонивший назовёт фамилию абонента (или – что ещё проще – название фирмы, на которую зарегистрирован номер).
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EnterEX 2007 / expoTEL 2007 – the host of crooks

EnterEXEnterEX 2007 seems to prove to be not only the total failure (in terms of mass last-minute revoked participations) after 2006′s peak exhibition performance, but also a host of choice for the world-class scammers.

[Russian] Выставка Информационные технологии для бизнеса EnterEX 2007 показала себя не только, как грандиозный провал после успеха 2006 года, но и как пристанище для мошенников мирового класса.
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SAR is hidden by most mobile phone manufacturers

Have you noticed how craftily mobile phone manufacturers hide the single but probably most controversial piece of information – SAR?

(SAR stands for Specific Absorption Rate – a measure of radio wave energy exposure upon a cellular phone user. It varies greatly between phone models even by the same maker)

So far only Siemens has been found to clearly state this parameter on the product pages in its website. Samsung-Europe publishes it on their website quite prominently, but not in the product manuals.

All the others producers checked (Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola) guard it pretty heavily.

For e.g. Nokia makes these data available in seemingly convenient form but keeps them on an isolated domain. Why not on the same pages with the rest of the technical data? That’s easy – to exclude them from the product selection process.

Sony-Ericsson buried this 2-significant-digit value into a 2.5 MB (!) PDF file – a dedicated monster for each single cell phone model – probably to deter the inquisitiveness of the potential customers.
FYI: it’ll take an average dial-up user (these users still comprise some 40-60% of all home users or more, depending on the market) half an hour to download this “document” of the WHOLE TWO decimal digits for only one phone model.

So why’s that?
Do they just keep customers for brainless cattle?
Do they fear that customers are going to make “wrong” purchasing decisions based on “unimportant”, but highly vexed data which SAR definitely is?

The marketer’s logic in Sony-Ericsson’s case is fairly clear: dial-up users are overly conservative folks who don’t understand the benefits of broadband which is very cool and it is very wrong not to choose new technology. These marketers aren’t willing to realize that dial-up users are just being reasonable in not going for crazy speeds (or any other new “cool” stuff for that matter) – they can’t read text at 2 Megabits per second anyway, so why pay for it?

Therefore, mobile makers probably think, it’s better to liberate these unfortunate from any distractions. Or otherwise these consumers will risk conservatively sticking to their old handsets thus spoiling sales prospects.

World War 3, if at all, likely to happen on the Internet

Everyone hates spam. I mean, ok, some people may actually like advertising, but spam isn’t just ads. Most spams are genuine frauds & scams. And who likes to be defrauded?

So why hasn’t it been stopped yet? Why do we see the volume of spam in our mailboxes only growing instead?

One of the markings of the past ’06 was the drastic attempt by guys of BlueSecurity (Israel based BTW) to finally stop this vice. The idea was brilliant – to block spammers with the spammers’ methods – DDoS against the spamvertised sites (used to distribute goods – either electronic or physical), effectively stopping sales, not the innocent zombified home computers (used to promote those goods).

The plan was so huge, it hit spammers really hard, but didn’t stop spam on Earth.

Unfortunately the good guys have lost this blitzkrieg. The spammers struck back and made notable collateral damage to the whole Internet, generating quite a lot of news – on slashdot.org, Washington Post etc.

As we see, it is a multimillion-dollar business which makes tier-1 ISPs to play to their tune. This is the problem as ever more laymen are joining the Internet in coming years. The more technically unsavvy the average Internet user becomes, the more desirable target for spammers the userbase presents.

Sadly, unprofessional users are both consumers of spam and tools in hands of spammers to spread the evil.

And as long as big criminals are entering the game (see BBC report for e.g.) we are about to become witnesses of large financial interests repartition which historically leads to… wars.

Furthermore, assuming these interests are not merely large, but worldwide – just like the phenomenon of Internet economy suggests – the problem at hand (the war) provokes to be more precisely called “The World (War)”…

Akismet anti-spam exaggerating efficiency by 10x

Being generally happy with Akismet spam protection plugin for WordPress 2.0, I’m still kept from total happyness by a fly in the ointment.

Before enabling Akismet I used to use a built-in setting in WordPress called “Comment Moderation” (“Hold a comment in the queue if it contains more than N links.”) Of course, “a common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks” is a pretty dubious spam filter and I did get hundreds of spams in short periods of time with it enabled. But surprisingly or not, now I constantly see about 90% of all spam caught by Akismet being that kind of spam with multiple links (I used “2 links” as a trigger for holding comments). That is, Akismet takes bulk of the spam caught by WordPress and misappropriates it to its own portfolio!

So I’m wondering if Akismet really benefits from breaking this standard feature. Surely they could reduce load on their servers by quite a few-fold having they left the feature alone. Moreover, WordPress webmasters are usually up on with this sort of things and are but irritated with the crazy spam counters in Akismet tab.

I realize Akismet is trying to enjoy powerful promotion in this manner, but doesn’t it go too far by depriving users of the right to judge its effectiveness adequately? Really, the spam count is absolutely irrelevant this way; it’s like telling the size of computer network by the number of copper nuclei constituting all the wires of the network.

Bayesian filtering is nothing new and Akismet may easily loose the competition to a more honest operator. Even more so in the situation where operational data ages quickly and new players catch up promptly with the veterans.