July 2011

Dear Client,

We had a server fail on us a few days ago that we back our other servers up to. Toasted the motherboard and the c: drive. Fortunately this was the easiest one we have to replace and it’s back in operation.

Read recently where a very brave group of researchers at UC San Diego took all spam filters off test email accounts for about 3 months to study spam. In that period they received close to a billion spam messages and also purchased about 200 products by credit card so they could study the entire spam industry.

The results were very enlightening. It turns out that 90% of spammers use 3 financial institutions to process their customers’ purchases. That is one of the best chokeholds anyone has ever found. Stop sending money to these institutions, and 90% of the con artists who use spammers won’t have income to pay them.

Unfortunately it will take a change to our banking regulations to allow (require?) banks to stop doing business with ‘spam banks’. Certainly worth pursuing, though.

There’ve been a lot of news items this last month on companies whose security has been breached. The most recent was Chase, where several million dollars were siphoned from people’s credit cards. As cardholders we’re not liable for these charges, but the hassle factor is still enormous. And there seems to be no shortage of successful breaches where hackers steal personal information on companies’ clients.

And I still get clients who don’t protect their computers with antivirus packages. Main reason given: “I don’t have any personal information of value on my computer”. Folks, it doesn’t matter. Your computer can be turned to an attack computer to launch attacks on other computers around the Internet. If any prosecutor wanted an easy case, you could be held liable for it through negligence. Not likely that any DA would pursue it, but the reality of it is every Internet-connected computer needs to have antivirus protection.

The garden is now in full production. We are harvesting about a bushel of tomatoes every couple of days, mostly for canning. Some of our Big Boy tomatoes have come in way better than expected: 5+ inches across and 1+ pounds each. I had a couple of ½” slabs from one of these with some cottage cheese for lunch. As did Shirley. Off the same tomato. We did have to cover some rows with bird netting, as they are masters at finding the ones just turning ripe.

We will be closed July 4 th in observance of Independence Day. Hope you have a safe and fun weekend.

Best wishes!

Sincerely,

Ben Conner