Reports are being made that a text message has been sent from Melbourne train company “Connex” which mentions their staff killing people.

ALLAHU AKBR FROM CONNEX! our inspectorS Love Killing people - If you see one coming, run. Want to bomb a train? they will gladly help! See you in hell!

The report was first mentioned by a user on the whirlpool forums.

did anyone else who subscribe to connex sms for delays/cancellations get a really weird sms from them about their inspectors killing people?; EgoManiac whirlpool forums

So there’s the question, how safe are you from signing up to system’s such as this? Wouldn’t you think Connex had a system in place to stop this? And what kind of charges have been made against customer’s mobile bills?

Update #1; “J” below has contacted us and notified us that a text message was sent out approximately 1 and a half hours after the strange text message was sent stating “A hoax message was sent tonight to some users. Connex apologises and is investigating with the police.”

Well after a few month’s of awesome tutorials on how to launch your own online business, APC have today launched their “GeekGear” website!

Geek Gear is a real online store, but one with a difference. You can purchase gear from it, but also find out what’s going on behind the scenes.; Tony Sarno, APC Magazine Editor

You can grab loads of ‘geek gear’ including t-shirts, caps, backbacks and even cool gadgets including LED Binary clocks and MP3 Players. And that’s not all, according to the homepage new products will be added and improvements made!

Geek Gear is an ongoing experiment and it will feature over the next few months in APC Magazines ecommerce workshop series; Geek Gear Hompage

Each product is directed towards geeks, hence the name. One of the finest products that openly suggests this is the T-shirts with some of the following phrases:

• you + me =2.0hhh!;
• geeks.. you know how to push all the right buttons!; and
• No I won’t be your tech support;

Post your comments below!

S ounds too good to be true? Well it is, kind of. What if I told you that you could purchase an illegal copy of the latest version of the Windows Operating System for $8 with a unique serial number?

Microsoft have been cutting down on piracy which has included some controversial changes such as removing VLK licenses and replacing them with a KMS Activation Server. Also their WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) system has cut down the amount of pirated users as it will eventually lock out your system so that you can pretty much pay or lose your Operating System access.

However, crackers have found a way to generate unique serial numbers and can therefore sell the OS at a very cheap price.

The copied version of Vista is presently presented by an Iranian software company and provides the possibility for its owner to have a private “Serial Number” and thus, to “legalize!” his cracked Windows copy; TaliyaNews

However what will this affect legitimate users? What would happen if say, the piraters generate a code that’s an exact match to yours?

I just hope they don’t cause problems for people who pay for legit versions. Would piss me off if some free loader had my serial ; Sirikan - Whirlpool User

Sirikan says it all. How would you feel forking out an enormous $700 to go home, install and then get plastered with “NOT GENUINE”. This is something I sincerely hope Microsoft will have a think about.

Have comments about this article? Please post them below!

Well you’ve heard all the great new features of Vista. Aero, Ultimate Extras, Speech Recognition…. There’s no doubt that there will be bugs and security holes but it looks like we’ve found the first one!

Apparently, hackers can take advantage of the new “Speech Recognition” software hard coded into Windows Vista to delete files, shut down your PC or even allow backholes to be uncovered. But how?

Blogger George Ou reported to ZD Net that the flaw was in fact attacked at by playing an audio clip in the speakers that will in turn go through your microphone and tell the PC to do whatever the audio clip says to do.

So in such a case it is possible to delete important documents and empty the trash, which in turn will make them non-recoverable. Microsoft however don’t seem to think this is such an issue after all.

The exploit scenario would involve the speech recognition feature picking up commands through the microphone such as ‘copy’, ‘delete’, ’shutdown’, etc. and acting on them; Microsoft Security Research Blogger

But will this flaw be fixable? How do you think users can be protected? Post your comments below!

Companies advertise in many weird ways.. popups.. under popups… banners… and pretty much any other way they can. Usually it does wonders for the companies but what happens when advertising turns bad?

Browsing the forever ending internet I came across a post titled “product placement” which gave a screenshot of a very funny occurance with one of Toyota’s new advertising techniques.

If you don’t get what’s so funny about the image, you can see the post on Eyewitness News which is titled “Teacher hit by car outside Queens school“. On top you can see a promotional advertisement for Toyota, with a man wearing a Toyota shirt pointing at himself. If you think of it this way, he’s pretty much telling you it was Toyota’s fault.. of course, this is just an advertisement glitch.

Know of any other funny advertisement problems? Post them below in the comments box!