joeware - never stop exploring... :)

http://www.xtranormal.com/

I try not to advertise too much but I wanted to share this deal as it is an amazing savings.

The Jawbone Era Blue Tooth Headset which is $129.99 everywhere is currently the deal of the day on Amazon.com and is only $69.99

Jawbone ERA Blue Tooth HeadSet link

You may also want to get some ear gels which make the headsets stick in your ear even better.

Jabra Ear Gels for Jawbone BT HeadSet Link

http://www.ustream.tv/channel-popup/ourhummingbirdnest-com

http://www.whatisblik.com/shop/explore

All sorts of wall graphics like the following:

I have started seeing emails similar to the title of this blog post trickle in the last few weeks. It had me totally confused until someone sent me something a little more informative:

Just to make it known, your name has been attached to malicious software involved in involuntary GPU mining for the purpose of bitcoin farming. The farmer was improperly coded so I caught it however. The output string from command line ( Eligius ) gave me the following. I will be exploring this Tor site in the next few hours and if this is you actively seeking to farm users of their GPU power, I highly suggest you cease and desist as this is a highly illegal activity.
Parameters: "-o" "http://mining/eligius.st:8337" "-u" "13j4XQEnXzgTi3ihJLLi3DctDZbU26KJ16" "-p" "x"

joe@joeware.net Joe Richards

I still don’t really know what it means but I expect it is some sort of malware that someone, not me, is installing on PCs. I don’t know what people are clicking on or installing or whatever that is loading this on their PCs but again, this isn’t me, I can’t help you. My first recommendation is to know what you are installing and clicking on but that is too little advice too late. But I still can’t help you. If this is a work PC, call your helpdesk. If this is a personal PC, call the manufacturer, or call a PC support company like Best Buy. 

If you absolutely must have me to figure it out for you, go to my blog (http://blog.joeware.net), look in the upper left corner where it says tip jar, click on PayPal Donate, and specify $2000 and your email address you want me to contact you on. I will receive that and then send you an email with my home address. You will send the PC along with a paid return shipper and I will sit down, figure out what is going on your PC and make it so my utility is no longer running on the PC. That is the only help I can offer.

How can I prove I didn’t put this malware out there you ask? Simple, I am not a complete and utter idiot.

While at times I am mislead or confused and sometimes, more times than I prefer, I make mistakes, I am not  a complete and utter idiot. How does that prove that I didn’t do this? If you take the statement "joe loaded this on my PC and is GPU mining on my PC" as a fact, the very next fact you can see is that my full name and email address pop up. And from that you can deduce that "joe is a complete and utter idiot." Again, I was smart enough to write the QUIET utility initially  which included purposely putting my name and address in it and I will state for the record that I am also smart enough to remove the name of the utility along with my name and email address and recompile it if I chose to be subversive with the utility. I would further say that I wouldn’t even allow it to output what you see above and in fact you would never see a console window flash but those things don’t help with the proof.  I am not an idiot so ipso facto, Shazam, AllaKhazam, voila, and tada… I didn’t do this.

Anymore questions on this, you know where the tip jar is.

   thank you and have a good day.

        joe

It’s kind of cool when I pull up the RevolverMaps to look at who is checking the blog out and I see something like:

While I am not a fan of killing people in any grand scale I am proud to see the U.S. Armed Forces reading the blog and I assume using the utilities to help make their lives easier. Now if I could only get a tax break for that… 😉