As I sorted through several dozen newly arrived e-mails this morning I noticed one from "Provider Inc." with "Order Sales Order" in the subject line. "Damn phishers," I thought as I prepared to send the message to the digital Dumpster.

On second thought, I wondered what would make someone fall for a message that appeared to me like an obvious phishing attempt. Well, people respond to sales receipts even if they haven't bought anything online recently--nobody wants to be charged for something they didn't buy.

So "Sales Order" was the first hook. After opening the message--carefully--the clues to its bogus nature were everywhere. "North Luigi, AZ"? Are you kidding me? A fax number with a prefix of "006"? C'mon. The sad fact is, some of the poor souls the phisher targets with this e-mail will take the bait.

This phishing e-mail bears the telltale signs of a scam: fake telephone and fax numbers, nonexistent address, and grammatical errors.

As phishing attempts go, this one was fairly well crafted. First, it managed to get through Gmail's built-in phishing filters. Second, it resembles a real invoice. You have to look closely to find the grammar errors and other mistakes that confirm a fake: "till" instead of "until," double "at," duplicate street addresses, and mismatched zip codes.

User education is the key to phishing prevent... [Read more]

One of the great things about the Chrome browser is the ability to customize its appearance with the use of themes. The Chrome Web Store has a decent selection of themes to choose from, but if you're not thrilled with the premade themes, you can create your own. Here's how:

If you're already familiar with JSON files, the Theme Creation Guide might be all you'll need to get started For the rest of us, there's a Web site called ChromeTheme.net that has a Web-based Chrome theme creator. We'll go over some of the basics of using the Chrome Theme Creator to create, save, and install your own Chrome theme.

Step 1: Go to the Chrome Theme Creator. The left side of the page contains the tools for creating the theme, and the right side displays a preview.

Step 2: If you just want to use your own wallpaper in the large white space of Chrome and be done with it, upload the wallpaper at the theme_ntp_background image element, then move on to Step 3. To create a full theme, however, click through... [Read more]

The Corona Indie Bundle comes with five games and shares a portion of the proceeds with three charities.

Game bundles for PCs and Macs are a dime a dozen. The best ones, like the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle I wrote about last week, share a portion of the proceeds with a worthy charity.

But here's something you don't see every day: an app bundle for smartphones. The Corona Indie Bundle comes with five games for Android and iOS. Purchased separately, they'd cost you around $8. Bundle price: 99 cents.

The deal gets better: 17 percent  of the purchase price (an odd amount, I grant you) gets split between three good causes: Bliss, Child's Play, and Dispensario de Managua.

Need even more incentive? If the Corona guys manage to move more than 100,000 bundles, they'll unlock a sixth game (the identity of which is a mystery, mwa ha ha!). Here's a rundown of the five you're guaranteed to get:

... [Read more]

Microsoft is gearing up for another Patch Tuesday.

In its regular series of monthly security fixes, the company tomorrow is launching eight separate bulletins to patch 23 different holes in a small but key range of products. Marked as "critical," two of the bulletins are aimed at stopping hackers from remotely running code in Windows, Internet Explorer, .NET, and Silverlight.

Specifically, these two bulletins are deemed critical for the desktop versions of Windows and should be applied to Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Only one of the bulletins is tagged as critical for Windows Server 2003, 2008, and 2008 R2 as the server editions of Windows offer tighter security than their desktop cousins.

Related stories: • Microsoft hands Rustock botnet case over to FBI • Microsoft falsely labels Chrome as malware • Microsoft issue fixes, blacklists more DigiNotar certificates • ... [Read more]

Not bad for a nonprofit.

The Mozilla Foundation, the developer of the Firefox Web browser and an organization charged with defending openness on the Web, plans to report today that its revenue increased 18 percent from $104 million in 2009 to $123 million in 2010.

Expenses rose, too, though--from $61 million to $87 million--and Mozilla generated less net cash, down from $26 million to $22 million, according to Mozilla's tax filings. But hey, in case you missed it--Mozilla measures its success by improving the Web, not amassing a pile of cash.

Mozilla, with help from Opera Software's Opera browser and later Apple's Safari, slowly chipped away at the dominance of Internet Explorer, and Microsoft now has gone whole hog for developing a modern, high-performance browser. The Web standards Mozilla long advocated are now ascendant, though not without a lot of chaos as they're developed. Yet Mozilla in a way faces more challenges now that many of its ideals have prevailed.

That's because browsers are more competitive than ever--and the rising use of Safari and Chrome, along with IE's starring role in Windows 8, mean browsers from commercial interests are waxing in influence.

Mozilla argues that Firefox remains relevant, though. "Mozilla is unique in that we build Firefox to provide an independent offering focused solely on individual experience and the overall good of the Web," the company said in its annual report. As evidence, it p... [Read more]

Microsoft has tweaked the use of memory in Windows 8 to help people juggle more applications and files with less physical RAM.

In the latest Building Windows 8 blog, Bill Karagounis, group program manager for Microsoft's Performance team, detailed some of the tricks that the company has employed in the new OS to optimize the use of memory.

One such trick is memory combining. Windows applications can reserve multiple chunks of system memory, not just what for they need now but what for they may need in the future. The more apps that do this, the more memory used up.

Memory combining searches system RAM for duplicate content and then frees up the duplicates to hold just a single copy. If an app needs that freed-up memory in the future, Windows provides what's called a "private copy." Such a process can make anywhere from 10s to 100s of megabytes available, according to Karagounis.

Related stories: • Windows 8 debuts at Microsoft Build (live blog) • Microsoft's Build keynote: 5 key takeaways • ... [Read more]

The first beta for Norton 360 version 6 arrived today, and it's notable for elevating the latest Norton Internet Security features to the 360 product line. Norton 360 v6 beta (download) is free to use, although the beta license is set to expire two weeks after installation.

The first Norton 360 version 6 beta brings an interface refresh, and hefty changes to the Identity Safe feature.

The Norton Management feature connects your local installation of Norton to a Web-based account interface. You can use it to remotely install Norton programs, such as the Online.Family tool for child protection, purchase or renew licenses, tweak security settings, and affect repairs without having to be physically in front of the computer.

The recent changes to the cloud-based, antifraud tool Identity Safe in Norton Internet Security made it more competitive with other high-end security suites. These changes include LastPass-styled password handling, cloud-based syncing and vaults, and a secure way to manage and store personal identification data online. The interface will also finally work in Google Chrome.

The new Download Insight stability ratings will rate your downloads for how they... [Read more]

Every year, Intuit releases a new version of Quicken. Most years, I interview some honcho at Intuit who's running the personal finance division and we talk about where the category is going. The meetings got a lot more interesting a few years ago, when Mint threw a monkey wrench into the personal finance software market, which led to Intuit acquiring Mint and bringing in its CEO, Aaron Patzer, to re-light the Quicken product line. (You can download Quicken from CNET Download.com.)

Patzer came in with grand visions and ideas to make Quicken a more modern and relevant app. He planned to integrate Quicken with Mint and rewrite the app from scratch to make it possible for Intuit developers to update it more frequently. And by update it, he meant really improve it, not just add peripheral new features and re-skin the app every year, as they've been doing for about the last 10.

Patzer, though, is no longer running the Quicken group at Intuit. Instead, Aaron Forth, another Mint executive who came along with the acquisition, is at the wheel. He has similar talking points as Patzer, but his time at Intuit has made him more realistic (or perhaps resigned) about the future of Quicken, the latest version of which, Quicken 2012, came out today.

Not every shot is perfect, but most are worth salvaging. Sadly, for most of us, image-editing software can be too intimidating or frustrating to use. Even GIMP, the open-source image-editing software, isn't immediately intuitive.

A Canadian usability research team has released AdaptableGIMP, which lets users search for tools based on what they want to do. It makes life much easier for nondesigners. Here's how to use it:

1. Download and install AdaptableGIMP.
2. Page through the intro screens and agree to take part in the research. (It will record some usability data.)
3. Set up an account, if you'd like.
4. Open up an image. Ctrl-O lets you browse your files for the image that you need to fix.
5. Over in the toolbox, you can search for task sets created by other users. These can help you fix what needs fixing, sometimes automating the process. I wanted to fix a scratch, so I searched for "blemish" and got a tool set.

Step 5: Select tool set.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rob Lightner)
6. Click the "i" icon next to the tool set name to get directions. This information comes from a wiki, so you can expect the more popular or common tasks to have better instructions, but all the ones I tried were thorough and clear... [Read more]