We had a credit seminar at Gordon Cooper Tech Center a while back. During the seminar we looked at the interest rates of different loans depending on your credit score. It amazed me how much the end cost varies with your credit score. I learned that with bad credit, a $10,000 car can cost you twice that, and a $150,000 home can end up costing over half a million dollars after the included cost of interest rates. We also learned what needs to be done to insure your credit score stay good so that I won’t end up paying these extreme interest rates.
SpyEye hacker toolkit becomes widely availible
According to USA Today. A “premier hacker’s toolkit” called SpyEye has recently been made available for anyone to buy. The program is capable of giving commands to thousands of “bot computers” that have been highjacked by a cyber criminal. Once your computer is highjacked it can be used to send spam, for hacktivist attacks, and most notably can steal your bank information and invisibly transfer money from your account to the hackers, deleting all traces that it ever occurred.
The application has been cracked and is being sold by 3rd party’s and is being sold for as little as $95, and may even be available to download for free via bittorrent. This toolkit has existed since late 2009 but until now cost over $6,000 to buy and was only being used by 14 rings of criminals. Since the application is now more widely used the chances of being infected are increasing. The chances of the hackers being caught are decreasing as well since the toolkit is now being used by more people.
To protect yourself you should have up to date anti spyware and antivirus installed and running on your computer, but keep in mind this does not guarantee your security. You can also download the Firefox addon “HTTPS everywhere ” which will enable the more secure protocol on all websites that support it.
How my $500 computer cost me $900
For a long time I had been considering building a PC. You can simply get more for your money if you build your own PC (Unless you happen find a good sale). When building a PC be sure to add everything up though, I expected my PC to cost about $500, but it ended up being almost $900 for everything.
Free iPhone SMS With Google Voice and Tlert
If you know very much about jailbreaking, you probably have heard of the Cydia apps “Quickreply” or “Tlert”. These apps allow you to reply to text messages directly from any application. But what you may not know, is that there is a way to use them for sending and receiving SMS for free via Google Voice. I have been a long time user of “Textfree” to save money on my phone bill, but it is rather slow, buggy, and won’t work with Tlert or Quickreply. With “SMS GV Extension” you can use all the native features of the iPhones messaging with your Google Voice account for completely free text messaging.
So I made a WordPress Blog…
I really don’t know why. I keep up with Facebook but I felt like I should have something more formal with less “jk’s” and “lol’s”. I really don’t know what will be put on here in the future. I have a hard time sticking to one topic, but everything usually ends up being technology related.
