Facebook Phishing/SPOOF site alert - FaceBook Staff sent you a message

I received an email allegedly from "facebook staff" today saying they had sent me a message - along with the usual login to view your message.

Without thinking twice i clicked the link which too me to a facebook login page. I then noticed it wasn't on the facebook URL so straight away realised it was a phishing site.

I am used to simply ignoring Bank scams but this is the first facebook scam email I've had so was a little off guard. Luckily i didnt enter my details as i spotted the url. I think the first thing that made me double check is my email wasn't in the login box.

So beware people!!!!!! I have forwarded the email to facebook abuse so they can take it up.

Here is the email so you can see how it goes:

FaceBook Staff sent you a message.


To reply to this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1002177311480&mid=4d5a0fG42a40ba3G25970cG0

___
This message was intended for FaceBook Staff. Want to control which emails you receive from Facebook? Go to:
http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications&md=bXNnO2Zyb209MTY1Njc3MzA4OTt0PTEwMDIxNzczMTE0ODA7dG89MTExODA0NzEzOQ==&mid=4d5a0fG42a40ba3G25970cG0
Facebook's offices are located at 156 University Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94301.

How to add a Blogger Adsense Policy - Googles new Privacy Policy T&Cs

On April 8th 2009 if you are running Adsense on your blog (or any website come javascript:void(0)to that) you will need to have updated your Blogger Adsense Policy.

If you are running Adsense on your website and do not have a Privacy Policy you are contravening Googles Terms and Conditions and risk having your account terminated.

They are not hard to put together and i got mine from Jensense.com which is a great blog about adsense.

The easiest way would be to take my privacy policy from here and tailor it your site. Its a two minute job.

What a lot of people have trouble with is knowing how to add a privacy policy to a blogger blog. Blogger isnt like Wordpress where you can add pages so you have to be a little more clever.

Heres how to do it:

1. Open my adsense policy from here here.
2. Copy and paste it into notepad.
3. Search and replce my url and replace it with yours.
4. Create a new post on your blog and paste it in.
5. Go to the post options at the bottom of the post window.
6. Set the date and time to before your first post date - i went for 01/01/01 00:00.
7. Add a tag called Privacy Policy
8. Submit the post.
9. Go to the blog categories and select the Privacy policy category.
10. This will display the post.
11. Click on the header to open the single post up.
12. Copy the url.

Now we are going to create a new area on your blog.

1. Go to the customize page on your blog.
2. Add a new HTML block to the top right of your blog (or wherever you want to place it.
3. Give it the title Privacy Policy.
4. Add an anchor for the post by clicking on the link button.
5. Add the url to the popup (you may get a popup warning so enable popups and repeat)
6. Now edit the anchor ('A' html tag) to give it the title of your blogs privacy policy like this:

 <a href="full url to post here">omensblog privacy policy</a>

(i have had to change the URL to get it to fit - you should insert your post url here)

Now save and view. Clicking on the privacy policy will now take you to your privacy policy post.

Easy peazy.

Not doing this isnt worth getting kicked off the adsense program - especially if you make some good money from it!

Visual Studio Tutorial

If you are looking for Video Tutorials on how to develop applications on the .Net framework for either Windows Forms, ASP.Net, WPF etc. then I highly recommend Learn Visual Studio.Net.

I have been a member at LearnVisualStudio.net for almost 4 years after I signed up to their lifetime subscription (which to be fair is as cheap as chips)! They are constantly adding new visual studio tutorials in line with the current technology and they have just recently started doing their videos for iPhone also (guess who just got a new iPhone as well! :D ) . Its brilliant stuff and the return Ive had on my tiny investment is fantastic.

I am just currently working through their new videos on Visual Studio 2010, The MVC Framework and Windows Presentation Foundarion. Lots to learn! They have some free starter videos to let you get a feel of the quality they have to offer.

If you looking for a tutorial on the Visual Studio IDE then Keith Elder - a Microsoft MVP, has put together a great video that takes you through the basics of Visual Studio.

The video takes you through what Visual Studio versions are available, its key components, customising its behaviour and also how to change the look and feel using themes.

All in all its a great Visual Studio Tutorial. It looks to be a multi part series so you can subscribe to his videos or visit his blog at keithelder.net to check get further installments.

[DBNETLIB][ConnectionOpen (Connect()).]SQL Server does not exist or access denied Error

Had a totally weird thing ahppen to a sql server today.

I have 2 linked servers and for some unknown reason all queries to the linked server were being met with that error. I removed the linked server, re-added, tested i could connect to the port with telnet - all good.

Check remote connections enabled, checked tcpip enabled. Evrything seemed fine.

One of our machines rebooted with some critical update from Microsoft so wondered if something MS had pushed out may have caused the issue.

Anyhow, we finally fixed the issue but i am still 100% sure exactly what is the problem so maybe someone may be able to shed some light on things.

The way got around it was to remove the liked server and re-add it - but instead of adding it as a SQL Server, it was added using and OLEDB sql data source. After doing that it all sprung back into life.

Now to me that sounds like an issue with SQL Native Client on either the client or server. I wonder if microsoft has done something to some drivers somewhere along the line and pushed it out in a critical update???

Another strange this is i could not add a system datasource to point to the other server either - unless i specified the default port 1433! Totally whacky. The server i was trying to link was a named instance of sql2005. No idea why specifying the port it should have been using anyway worked - but it did!

Hope this sorts you out if you are having this problem. Had me stumped for about 3 hours.

Id be interested to hear your comments if you have an ideas of input. Its gonna bug me until i found out exactly whats happened as it was working fine the night before.