Beware Clever New Phishing Scam

This morning when I opened my email at the place where I work I nearly had a heart attack. I had received an email from PayPal about a computer I had just ordered from Dell. PayPal had deducted $700 from my account to pay for it. I knew I had not bought a computer, so my first thought was, "Oh My God, someone has accessed my account information at PayPal and has hit my bank account for $700!!" After I picked myself off the floor I started composing an angry email to PayPal, but before I finished it I thought, "Maybe this is a scam."

I went to my online bank and checked to make sure the $700 had not been deducted from my account. I went to PayPal and verified that the money had not been charged to my account. I looked at the email again. One thing that seemed strange was that the computer was being shipped to a man- someone I had never heard of - in Pennsylvania. I went to Google and searched for his name. The web site that opened contained a list of phishing scams people had submitted to it. Near the bottom of the email, below the "list of purchases," was a huge button that read: "Click here to Cancel Transaction." I right-clicked on the button and looked at its properties. It said: "blocked:http://vanguardngr.com//www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/login.html.

I copied the first URL into the browser and was taken to a website in guess where-- NIGERIA!!! If I had clicked on the Cancel Transaction button I would have been sent to a phony website that looked like the PayPay home page, where I would have been asked to login with my user name and password. That information would have been sent to the website in Nigeria, the world capital of Internet Scams!! Uh Oh!! Am I glad I knew how to check all this out. Would a 75-year-old person who barely knows enough about computers to type an email known this was a scam. Maybe, if he or she was a retired professor of computer science. I have to admit this was a clever scam. One thing that should have made my suspicious was that the email was addressed to "Member." If it was legit, it should have been addressed to me. Also, there was a four-cent difference in the total amount of the "purchase" in the two places where it was listed.

You can read an interesting article on phishing at Wikipedia. Click here.

XHTML And HTML - What Are The Differences?

In my last post I listed ten technologies I think every web designer should know. In this post I am going to describe some of the differences between the previous standard, HTML, and the new standard, XHTML. First, the good news: if you are currently using HTML 4.01 to design your web pages, it will be very easy for you to convert to XHTML 1.0.

XHTML is based on XML (eXtensible Mark-up Langguage). To the browser it behaves exactly HTML. The major differences between HTML and XHTML 1.0 are the tighter rules required by the latter. Let's discuss what they are. The most important differences, according to www.w3schools.com are:

Please ignore the ' inside each XHTML tag. I added them because when you write a blog you are writing HTML. If I had not inserted an extra character inside each tag, the browser would have assumed I was trying to write HTML code and given me error messages. When I type <'HTML>, ignore the left apostrophe.

1. XHTML elements must be properly nested. (Example: <'h2><'b>This Heading is bold<'/b><'/h2>).

2. XHTML elements must always be closed. (Example: In HTML this tag does not have to be closed, i.e., <'p> with no closing <'/p> tag is acceptable. XHTML requires both <'p> and <'/p>.

3. XHTML elements must always be in lowercase. In HTML all these element tags are correct: <'HTML>, <'Html>, <'html>. XHTML always requires <'html>.

4. XHTML documents must have one root element. In other words, all XHTMl elements must be nested within the <'html> root element.

5. In XHTML attribute names must be in lower case and must be in quotes. (Example: <'table width="760">) This is incorrect: <'TABLE WIDTH=760>.

6. Atttibute minimization is forbidden. (Example: This is wrong: <'input checked>. This is correct: <'input checked="checked" />.

7. The id attribute replaces the name attribute. (Example: This is wrong: <'img src="frodo.jpg" name="frodo1" />. This is correct <'img src="frodo.jpg" id="frodo1" />.

8. All XHTML documents must have a DOCTYPE declaration. The minimum XTHML document template:


<'html xmllns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<'head>
<'title>Differences Between HTML and XHTML<'/title>
<'/head>
<'body>
Content goes here.
<'body>
<'/html>

NOTE: The World Wide Web Consortium requires that DOCTYPE be typed in all caps. IT is not part of the XHTML document itself and is always placed before the opening <'html> tag.

Most web designers are using XHTML 1.0 Transitional because it is more compatible with HTML and with current web browsers. It is much easier to convert HTML to XHTML 1.0 Transitional than to XHTM 1.1 Strict. The W3W has been working on XHTMl 2.0 for several years, but it is not ready for release.

10 Essential Technologies Every Web Designer Should Know

I have been creating web pages and web sites for about ten years. Part of my job as an instructional designer at a community college is creating web pages/web sites for our faculty members. When I started building web pages there were no good web design programs such as Dreamweaver, so I learned to build them in HTML code. I will always be glad I learned HTML before I learned programs such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, because I understand how web pages are designed from the ground up and I can always "look under the hood" when I have to fix a problem.

I have been thinking a lot lately about which software programs/technologies every person who wants to be a serious web designer should learn. This is my first attempt at putting together this list, and I may make changes in it from-time-to-time. I would be interested in reading comments from my readers about which web design technologies they think every web designer should know. Here are my top ten, in no particular order:

1. XHTML
2. XML
3. DOM (Document Object Model)
4. Javascript
5. Dreamweaver
6. Flash
7. PHP
8. Ajax or Ruby with its application developer Ruby on Rails
9. Photoshop
10. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

In future posts I will comment in detail about all these technologies.

How Do You Spell Relief- Not Having GLAUCOMA

About six months ago I had an eye exam. The optometrist thought there was a possibility I had glaucoma and told me to have an exam for glaucoma at another location of the same company which had the equipment to test my eyes for that condition. I had the test and the optometrist there said there no signs of glaucoma.

Today I had another test for glaucoma. Once again, the doctor said he saw no signs of glaucoma. Before I saw him I was trying to reconcile myself to losing the sight in one of my eyes, and possibly going blind someday. I was wondering if my pug could be trained to be a seeing eye dog!! Needless to say, I was very relieved to learn that I do not have glaucoma--at least not yet. Today the doctor said I will always be a "suspect" for glaucoma. Why couldn't he have said I would always be a "candidate" for glaucoma? If you're a candidate for something it sounds as though you might win something. When I hear the word "suspect" I think of being a suspect in a crime. Oh well-in six months I'll have another test for glaucoma, and I hope that the results show that I'm still merely a "suspect," not the winner of the glaucoma lottery!!

Welcome to UNIX!

I taught computer classes at my community college for eight years. Every semester the hardest thing by far to try to teach my students was file management. I always wondered why I could never teach them to even come close to navigating through Windows directories with my blazing speed as I effortlessly opened directories, copied files from one directory to another, made shortcuts, selected files, deleted files, ad nauseum. I have to admit that I have been working with personal computers since 1984 and that I have used every flavor of PC-based operating system from MS-DOS through Windows XP. That helps.

At least I thought I knew how to negotiate file directories until I started taking an online class in Perl. I had already worked my way through over 100 pages of the Dummies Guide to Perl and I thought the language was very easy to learn to program. I downloaded Perl 5.8 from the Web and installed it on my laptop. I made a directory on the C drive to hold my Perl scripts, typed my scripts in a text editor, and ran them from the command prompt. Very simple stuff. I thought the Perl class would be a breeze.

Welcome to UNIX, the favorite operating system of hard-core geeks! In my online class we make a connection to the UNIX server through Telnet, open the UNIX Pico editor and type our programs, save them, use chmod to set file permissions so we can open our files, navigate to the subdirectory we save our files in, and run the scripts.

This sounds much easier than it is. A Perl script has to be stored in a subdirectory you have to navigate to by following this path: /usr/local/bin/local/perl. To save a file, instead of using the ancient keyboard shortcut, Ctrl + C, you use Ctrl + o. To exit the Pico editor, you have to type Ctrl + X. I thought this command was used to cut text--not in UNIX.

To cut text you use Ctrl + k. To set the file permissions you type "$ chmod 755 filename". Once you actually get into programming in Perl, you learn that the language shares lots of things with other languages such as C++. If you know how to use variables, program loops, conditional statements, etc., it is a pretty easy language to learn. Perl's ability to handle anything you need to do in text files, retieve information from databases, etc., is truly impressive. If you have had to write C++ commands to manipulate text you will really appreciate Perl!

I could go on and on and on, but since you are asleep now if you have read this much of this boring post, I'll shut up and let you finish your nap.

Beware the "Free" Download

This morning I wanted to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes. I did a Google search for "download iTunes free." The first site Google found was one named "free-download-site." the iTunes logo was prominently displayed at the top of the page. At first I thought I was on the Apple iTunes download site, so I clicked the huge Download button near the top of the web page. I knew something did not seem right when I was asked to pay $37 for the download. Then, I knew I was not on the Apple iTunes site because Apple had not charged me anything to donwload the version of iTunes I already had on my computer. I went to Apple.com, found the iTunes page, and downloaded version 7 of iTunes free.

I am sure it is legal for the "free-download-site" to charge for iTunes downloads. Supposedly if you download the software from this site you receive some benefits such as tutorials and tech support. At the bottom of the site's home page a tiny footer
proclaims, "This website has no affiliation whatsoever with the owner of this software program, and provides ONLY a link to the software program." Please make sure you know whose website you are on if you don't want to pay for downloading software that is supposed to be free.