Say one has the domain www.itnews.com.mt – a typical email would contain the below:

Dear CEO / CTO,

We are a professional intellectual property rights consultant organization based in HongKong, we have an important issue to confirm with you.

1. On Apr. 18, 2011, one company named Kring Investment LLC applied for the following Domain Names with our organization.

• itnews.net.cn
• itnews.tm
• itnews.com.sa
• itnews.my
• itnews.bh

2. During our preliminary investigation, we found that these Domain Names’ keyword is identical with your Trade Mark, this is why we inform you.

3. I wonder whether did you consigned Kring Investment LLC to register these Domain Names with us?

4. If you do not have any relationship with this applicant, we assume that they have other purposes to obtain these Domain Names.

Currently, we have already postponed this company’s application. Please let the relevant principal make a confirmation with me ASAP.

Thanks & Regards,

Angus Luo
Tel :  +852 65170 438
Fax :  +852 30696 940
E-Mail :  angus@bestweb-hk.com
Homepage:  www.bestweb-hk.com

The dead giveaway in such a scam was that contacting them to ask for the prices of these domains , they will get back to you with exorbitant domain prices in the range of 400 to 500USD per domain!

Mind you, they do also have a backup plan. If you email them back and let them know that you are not interested, they try to give the last push to make you worry about the safety of your company’s image…

Thank you for your confirmation.

But I have to remind you that maybe they want to use these fields that domains represent to imitate your webpage, use false ads to cheat your clients, or develop an illegal website. Don’t you think what they do will damage your profits? Therefore, I suggest that you should protect these intangible assets, but we won’t demand you to do anything. As a domain name registrar, we have made preparation. We will pass that company’s registration within 48 hours. Once they sucessfully register them, we will not be involved in any problem about intellectual property and trademark dispute. If you still decide to give up these domains, so nothing we can do.

Best regards,

Angus

That does sound scary, but in all honesty – why would anyone bother to go through the hassle of registering an asian domain to represent your company, create a cloned website etc… just to harm your reputation – sounds like a long shot to me.

Solutions:

• If you receive such email – delete it immediately, don’t engage in a conversation.
• Check the email sender address : if it’s coming from a hotmail, yahoo or gmail address, there’s definately something wrong!
• If you are worried about losing such domains, go through a reputable domain registrar and register the domains there.

When upgrading the account is out of the question (even though it’s really cheap). Sorting through the emails would be a never ending task, and unfortunately, Gmail doesn’t offer any built in feature to find the largest emails in your mailbox. So in this scenario, one has to turn to a third party offering to handle this tedious task.

One solution would be to use Gmail’s IMAP service to download the emails to Outlook, and sort through the emails using Outlook’s email sorting capabilities. Outlook will connect to your Gmail account via IMAP and therefore when you delete an emails with big attachments locally, the same happens in your online inbox as well.

If you however find the above workarounds a little complicated, and that it would take ages to download all email, there’s an even simpler method that won’t even require you download or install anything – it’s called findbigmail.com.

This incredibly useful and simple to use web service will quickly find all the big email messages in your Gmail account that are taking up the maximum space. These messages are categorized with special labels to help you decide which of them should be removed to recover more space.

To get started, you simply connect your Gmail account with Find Big Mail using Google’s OAuth. It then scans all your messages for their sizes and send you an email notification once the scan is over.

You can then log into your Gmail account and act on messages marked with the labels to instantly reclaim space. I have freed up about 1GB of space from files I didn’t even know I had in my account.

For business users, this could also be an incredibly precious tool, since it can be used to delete any unnecessary files from your account, therefore you might be able to reduce storage costs from your Gmail service.

This service is run on donation basis, so if you like the tool, a donation to the team would be appreciated to help them cover the costs and keep the service running.

Luckily, I found this amazing guide that made the entire process so simple – everyone can follow this through to create your own Windows 7 Installer Flash disk!

http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-7vista-from-usb-drive-detailed-100-working-guide/

1. Ctrl+Shift+N to Create a New Folder
2. Ctrl+Shift+Click to Open a Program As Administrator
3. Shift+Right-Click Enhances Send to Menu
4. Shift+Right-Click on a Folder to Open Command Prompt
5. Win+Space to Quickly Show Desktop
6. Win+Up/Down/Left/Right for Moving the Active Window
7. For Dual Monitors: Win+Shift+Left Arrow Key to Move Active Window to Left Monitor
8. For Dual Monitors: Win+Shift+Right Arrow Key to Move Active Window to Right Monitor
9. Win+T to Get to Taskbar Items
10. Shift+Click on a Taskbar App to Open a New Instance of the App
11. Win+B to Move Focus to the System Tray
12. Win+P for Quickly Connecting Your Laptop to a Projector
13. Win+1, Win+2..so on for Opening Taskbar Programs
14. Win+Pause helps you check System Properties
15. Ctrl+Shift+Esc Can Quickly Windows Task Manager

I hope you find them useful. If I’ve missed a cool shortcut, do share that in the comments!

Please note that is is not an easy quick way to restore your computer. Please consult with a techie before trying anything yourself.

Normally these infections start with a popup message coming from a rogue site or advert—and they are often served up from porn/warez/torrent sites, though these viruses are not exclusively from there.

The First Step:

The first thing we have to do is to kill this annoying software that’s currently running on the system, and there’s a really easy way to kill Internet Security 2010 without downloading any special software just to kill it.

Open up the Start menu, click the Run button (you can also use the Win+R shortcut key or insert the command in the search area in the Windows 7 start menu), and then type in the following:

taskkill /f /im is2010.exe

Hit the Enter key, and the main virus window should go away. After you’ve done that, you’ll want to quickly execute the following commands:

taskkill /f /im winlogon86.exe
taskkill /f /im winupdate86.exe

At this point the virus isn’t currently running on your system—but it’s still lurking in the shadows, but you can actually run any malware removal tools that you’d like. You should note that at this point, if you restart your computer, the virus will re-activate, and you would need to go back and re-apply the steps above to kill the software again.

Permanent Removal:

Once you apply the temporary fix above, you need to remove the actual malware from the system by downloading SUPERAntiSpyware and installing it. Once the software is installed, then click the Scan Your Computer button… make sure to perform a Complete Scan, and select all of your drives. Once the scan is finished, you can delete all the spyware found and finally getting rid of Internet Security 2010!

A VHD is a common virtualization file format that captures the entire virtual machine operating system and the application stack in a single file. You may run the VHDs on top of your current OS using Virtual PC.

You can download the VHDs and evaluate them for free in your own environment without the need for dedicated servers or complex installations. You may get the VHD files from the page below:

http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/en/us/solution-appliance-test.aspx

When you visit the page, you will also see VHDs from Microsoft partners like Citrix and Datacore. These VHDs are called virtual appliances. With the pre-built and pre-configured virtual appliances, we can evaluate Microsoft and partner virtualization solutions with less time and resources for installation and configuration.

The advantages of using VHD are clear. IT organizations can deploy standardized, ‘pre-built’ configurations on a single VHD. Software engineering organizations which need a specific set of tools for a particular project could simply ‘pull’ the appropriately-configured VHD from the locations shown above. They could also create their own VHD as a backup of their known working configuration.

Most facebook users will probably notice that usually, the first website listed in the search might be your facebook profile. If for some reason, you don’t want this to be in google’s index, there’s a setting in your facebook profile settings you can use. Follow the steps below.

* Go to Privacy Settings in Facebook
* Click on Search section link.
* Uncheck the Allow box for Public Search Results option.
* Confirm the selection and you’re all done!

Taking occasional backup of your data is relatively easy to do, you can simply copy your important files to a CD, DVD or a flash pen/memory card. If you have a lot of data you might want to also consider getting an external drive to hold all your precious data. For more vital data, one should also consider storing backup copies of the same data off site, in case of physical damage due to fire, floods, explosions or earthquakes.

The main problem is to actually remember to do your back-ups! One could opt in to a simple reminder on your schedulers or cell phones, however the best option would be to install a backup software to handle this task for you.

Some time ago, we reviewed GFI backup, a FREE and easy to use backup software that could help you manage such a mundane task. You can read the review here or take action now, and get started on your backups! Click here to download GFI Backup for FREE.