IBM ThinkPad R52 Gets Power But Won't Boot

In a previous post I outlined how my IBM ThinkPad R52 finally gave up the ghost. It would get power, the fans would spin, but it wouldn't get past the POST. There was no power on tests, no beep codes, no boot screens... nothing!

5 Million Gmail Addresses and Passwords Leaked: What This Means for You

Earlier today, news started making the rounds that a list of 5 million Gmail addresses and passwords was leaked on Tuesday, Sept 9 2014.

The list appeared on a Russian Bitcoin forum site and after some review, appears to be the result of a number of years of hacking and phishing campaigns as opposed to a direct assault on the Google mothership.

Some of the accounts also appeared to be quite old, and in some cases the gmail address appeared to be the username for another online account.

So what we are probably seeing is actually some hacker’s private stash rather than someone looking for help in cracking a password database.

Reviving A Dead Thinkpad Laptop

Here’s follow up on my previous post dealing with an intermittent IBM Lenovo R52 laptop.

In that post, I outlined how I had possibly found a solution to my laptop’s unreliable operation.

Unplugging the laptop; pressing the power button 10 times at 1 second intervals; holding it down for 30 seconds… Seemed arcane, but it worked.

At least temporarily.

Breathing New Life Into A Dead Thinkpad Laptop

If you own a Lenovo or IBM ThinkPad laptop, here is a tip I found that you’ll want to keep in your back pocket in case it starts to behave erratically or drops dead completely.

Yahoo Email Shows Viral Behavior

Yahoo Email Virus

Last weekend I received an unusual email from my sister.

She had sent the message to 6 or 7 people, some of them family members.  The subject line was something unintelligible.

And the content was a sales pitch for certain male performance enhancing recreational pharmaceuticals.

Naturally, there was a link to a website that held the chemical answer to all of mankind’s ailments, or maybe just man’s ailments.

My immediate thought was, “You got hacked!”

Internet Explorer 8 Security Flaw Leaves Hotmail and Twitter Vulnerable

As if you needed another reason to move from Internet Explorer to Chrome or FireFox.

Apparently this new flaw is a variant of an older security hole that was noted as far back as December 2009.  It exploits the way browsers like Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox handles something called CSS cross-site scripting

Detect Phishing Emails With These Online Apps

Email Phishing

While cleaning out my phishing email address, I came across several emails that were apparently from the FBI.

While they all appear to be from the same user, a robertmueller at fbi.gov, one of these emails came from someone on the Villanova campus. Apparently the sender forgot to modify one of the fields in their bulk email spamming software.