Florida Trade Commission Shuts Down Two Tech-Support Scam Companies

A federal court had temporarily shut down two companies which were providing bogus ‘tech support’ for computer throughout the country. It is been believed that these companies had managed to dupe an estimated $120 million.

Both of the accused companies modus operandi were fuelled by the greed and lack of knowledge on the part of honest customers. These companies have sold consumers unneeded software by tricking them to believe that their computers are under imminent threat or suffering from grave security threats which needed quick and instant technical help.

FTC Building Strong Case Against Scamming Companies

Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection has stated that these companies operations were essentially based on the lack of technical knowledge by the honest consumers. They had resorted to malpractices like the use of deceptive sales pitches accompanied with high-pressure tactics to sell their useless software and services and wreak millions of dollars out of it.

This isn’t the first time that the FTC has shut down the company resorting to scam based operations or business tactics. Earlier it had also shut down another fraudster company which ran an alleged scam wherein the callers pretended to be tech support for the giant tech-companies like Facebook (FB) and Microsoft (MSFT).

How These Companies Worked? 

Consumers are required to download an unpaid version of the software which is supposed to improve their computer’s performance. That software simply runs a system scan and identifies all sorts of problems, errors and threats. Later on users are asked to get their computer repaired and errors fixed by buying that particular software for $29-$49. Once they had bought it, they would be gently directed to a call a phone number which supposedly activate the software. Even after buying the consumers are pounded with more sales pitch to buy more number of computer repair services for better reason.

These companies also used to take remote access of the computers and promised to solve the technical issues and remove the threats from the devices for a whopping charge of $500.

FTC Gears Up For A Decisive Fight

A federal court in Florida has already taken the initial steps of temporarily shutting down these companies and their partners. Even appointed receivers and froze their assets until the case could be heard. Furthermore court has also ordered the respective authorities to disable their websites and phones numbers.

The FTC lawsuits have alleged these companies of violating the federal consumer protection laws along with telemarketing sales rules and the Florida Deceptive & Unfair Trade Practices Act.

The defendants are California based PC Cleaner Inc, Netcom3 Global Inc., dba Netcom3 Software and Florida based telemarketing companies PC Vitalware LLC; Inbound Call Experts LLC, Super PC Support LLC and Advanced Tech Supportco.

The defendants in another suit are Massachusetts-based Boost Software Inc and Florida based telemarketer OMG Total Protection, Vast Tech Support LLC, dbs OMG Tech Help, OMG Back Up, OMG Tech Help LLC, Success Capital LLC, downloadsoftware.com and softwaresupport.com.

New Start Up ‘Primary Data’ Grabs Wozniak and Stirs Virtual Storage Fight

Primary Data is creating right noises at the right time by grabbing up Apple co-founder Steve Wonziak as its chief scientist who was earlier working for the Fusion-io. Primary Data is asserting that it will be reinventing the ‘file virtualization’ for the software-defined data centers in a simple and fluid manner in coming time. Its announcement shows that the company is determined to take the head-on EMC’s ViPR and Quantum’s StorNext which works at the same level.

How Primary Data Came Into Being?

Primary Data has an interesting birth which mainly revolves around the shuffling of the major founders and players of the Fusion-io. Its founder David Flynn had also founded the server flash card startup Fusion-io in 2005 where Wozniak joined in 2009. In June this year Fusion-io was bought up by SanDisk for a whopping $1.1 billion. However Flynn and cofounder Rick while quietly left it before the sale and started up the Primary Data in the latter half of the 2013. Through shrewd administrative skills David brought back the Wozniak on its team in Primary Data.

Primary Data Introduces Its Virtualizing Data Plans

Primary Data’s ideas is to provide a symbolic scale-out meta-data service which give a centralized control and management at the same time staying out of the data path. It would also provide a single enterprise name space with multiple data paths for enhancing the performance.

David Flynn had described the Data Virtualitzation as the inevitable next step for the enterprise architectures. It has the potential to seamlessly integrate the existing infrastructure and its full spectrum of specialized capabilities is provided by the ultra performance and ultra capacity storage resources.

Data Hypervisor- An Innovative Solution By Primary Data

This technology would also possess a data hypervisor which will hide all the storage hardware and software below a global file namespace. It would also contain separate channels for sending and receiving data as well as controlling the access to the stored data. The data administrators could set the policy definitions for placing and moving information as per their needs. It would be done under set rules reflecting the storage performance, protection needs and price.

This software performs all the hard work in fluid manner of its utmost capacity and keeps the bytes in line. The data hypervisor can also migrate the information between file, block and object storage tiers as required with ease and grace.

Disaster recovery and backup methods are extremely simplified through snapshot policies which ensure that the data is protected and available. The snapshot layer is not integrated in the data path which makes it extremely fast and painless.

Primary Data Set To Revolutionalize the Enterprise Data

Primary Data has not disclosed which interfaces and access protocols it will support. It is supposed to be mediated by the enterprise as per their need and size. Software-defined data centre platforms had two key players namely EMC’s VMware and Openstack which are now feeling the heat of the emerging threat and challenge from the Primary Data.

GPS Satellites: Planet-Sized Dark Matter Detector Already In Orbit

The most common strategy that is pitched by the physicists is that they always try to take responsibility of their field’s limitations and they point out to the shortcomings in the modern physics and make it a reason for big investments in order to continue their physical research.

This strategy has been the same when the physicists tried to pitch about the dark matter and their related investigations. According to the physicists, they know that this dark matter and that two more than five to one. Although its gravity dictates the allocation of visible galaxies, they still do not have much information about it. Even though modern physics has given us with strong idea displaying the level, of ignorance, we have and this ignorance is being used against and for conducting costly experimenting event like the Large Hadron Collider.

Distributed Orbital Dark Matter Detector: 

According to a paper, which was published in the journal, Nature, this week comes forward to provide a solution. The paper states that our GPS satellites constellation, which is orbiting the Earth for decades, might be useful and can be used to carry out the function in the form of a planet-sized dark matter detector. This paper was written by a physicist himself, and he has specialty in atomic clocks. These atomic clocks allow keeping time about the nuclear decay and which allows everything including ultra-profitable high frequency trading on the stock market and global communications.

These clocks are also useful as they power the GPS satellites and provide accurate time-of-flight measurements about GPS signals. The system becomes very useful as they can provide precise information about the relative speed and the difference about the multiple GPS satellites and that too moving in completely different directions. Velocity and gravity are the way to warp the time.

The basic principle, which has been very clearly depicted in the recent sci-fi epic Interstellar clearly highlighted that, states that any amount of object, which is moving with different speed with give, measure the time differently and the same can be easily applied to objects moving around in the gravitational fields.

The paper clearly indicates that we might be able to track down the track matter with the help the GPS satellites network, which are orbiting our planet. If reports have be believed than $5-6 billion has already been paid for the Distributed Orbital Dark Matter Detector, which by the way is slightly less than the Large Hadron Collider.

Scientists will now be able to see the invisible dark matter, which create errors when they come close to the GPS satellites. Physical separation of the GPS clocks, which are orbiting, is very critical for this experiment. From what has been observed, looks like these dark matters does not cluster together as the other matters do in the space.

Scientists are expecting to see gravitational hotspots, expecting these dark matters to be collected in some dark planet or some dark star. As if now, these dark matters cannot compress themselves to form stars or black holes but they move freely in the universe. Even if the GPS is unable to detect the dark matters in the universe, it does not means that they don’t exist.

Google’s Mobile Search Now Comes with a Mobile Friendly Label

You might be among the people who enjoy using their Smartphone’s to the maximum potential and have not encountered any major issues in recent times. Still, it gets annoying sometime to stumble on a webpage, which requires lots of finger movements and acrobatics just to view them. There might have been times wherein you would have been fed up and totally given up to get into the website. Google has now come forward with a unique solution to overcome this issue with the websites. They have identified the need of mobile friendly sites in the search results.

The company is planning to roll out a new label in their search results, which will enable the users to know if the website they are visiting is mobile friendly or not. This will allow the smart phone users to be alert of the websites, which are not optimized for the mobile devices. This news was posted on Google Webmaster Central Blog on 18 November and posted by Doantam Phan and Ryoichi Imaizumi, who are the search members of the Google Mobile team.

What is the idea? 

According to Google, their idea of a mobile friendly site consists of a website, which should not be encouraging software, which are not much in use and the ones, which are not available on most of the devices. According to the company, they want a website with text, which should be effortlessly read by the users, there should not be any need for zoom in the screen to read the text. They want the websites to fit according to the display of the user’s phones and it should not be requiring them to scroll from one side of the screen to another to read the complete text.

One of the other reasons given by Google towards mobile friendly device will be placement of links to different websites to be far off. This way a customer will avoid clicking on websites they do not wish to visit. There is a special offering for web developers, wherein Google has come with a special page, which will allow the developers to enter and test their URL.

This way they will come to know if their website is mobile friendly or not. If it meets the criteria, it will be given the Google’s new label. Currently this service is being launched only in English, but the company is working on rolling it out in other languages as well. The Company also stated that they are working towards getting the mobile optimized websites to be listed above the other websites, when the customer is using to access them over their smart phones and tablets.

Release: 

This feature is expected to be released out in the next couple of weeks, but if you are among the people, who do not get their labels showing, the wait might too long.

Even though mobile users have not come across such feature until now, but certainly this step from Google will be an advantage for them.

Router – Networking Device – Specialized Hardware

Router, a networking device is a commonly specialized hardware which forwards data packets between networks of computers creating an overlay internet work in the form of a router. This is connected to several data lines from various networks and is commonly connected to two LANs or WANs or a LAN together with its ISPs’ network which are located at gateways, places where two or more networks are connected.

Routers tend to use headers and forwarding tables to identify the best path in forwarding the packets using protocols like ICMP in communicating with each other as well as configure the route between two hosts, keeping in touch through network advances.

When a data packet comes across one of the lines, the router has the capabilities of reading the address information in the packet and determines its ultimate destination and on using informing in its routing table or routing policy, it navigates the packet to the next network journey. Routers perform the task of directing the traffic function through the internet. The data packet is forwarded from one router to another through network which constitutes internet work till it arrives at the destination junction.

Connectivity Within/Between Enterprises and Internet

Small office and home routers are some of the familiar forms of routers which pass data like email, IM, web pages and videos between the internet and in home computers for instance, a router would be the owner’s cable or a DSL router that is connected to the internet through an ISP. Routers provide connectivity within enterprises, between enterprises and the internet or even between internet service providers – ISP networks.

Enterprise routers, which are rather sophisticated routers, are connected to large business or ISP networks up to powerful core routers which can forward data at high speed along the optical fibre lines of the internet backbone. High performance access points providing wireless connectivity are provided in resorts, churches, restaurants, universities, offices and schools.

Software based routers are getting more popular though routers are typically dedicated hardware. Some offer dual band wireless products, with companies providing their employees, staff or students with more options in transferring huge files within their network or while using other bandwidth intensive application. Multiple routers when used in interconnecting networks, exchange information regarding destination addresses with the use of dynamic routing protocol.

Interface for Different Physical Forms of Network Connections

Individual router tends to build up a table listing the desired routes on the interconnected networks between any two systems and the router has interfaces for various physical forms of network connections like the fibre optic, copper cables or wireless transmission.

It contains firmware for a various network communicating protocol standards where each network interface utilises this specialised computer software for data packets which is forwarded from one protocol transmission system to another system. Routers could also be used to connect to two and more logical groups of devices known as subnets with each having a different sub network address.

The subnet addresses that are recorded in the router do not directly map to the physical interface connections. Other networking solutions could be provided by Wireless Distributions System – WDS and avoid the cost of introducing networking cables in buildings.