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Showing posts from December, 2010

Watch Out! Telephone Tech. Support Scams

Watch out for a scam that’s on the go at the moment.  It goes like this: You get called up out of the blue by “Microsoft” or some such reputable-sounding company.  The person who calls you normally seems to have an Indian-sounding accent.  I purely mention the caller’s accent as it seems to be a common feature – you should watch out for this kind of scam regardless of the caller’s accent.  You are told that your computer is infected with a virus or with malware.  You are often asked if your computer has been running slowly or freezing lately. Of course they’ve got the solution for you!  At this point you’re often transferred to their “superior” or “manager” who tells you of the sorry state your poor computer is in and how they have the means to fix it.  For a fee of course.  This usually seems to range from 120 to 260 euro. The “fix” seems to involve them getting you to browse to their website and download some remote access software which they then use to take remote control of

Problems with PHP Header Redirect

Recently I was writing a PHP script which required a bit of code to redirect a user from the current page to another one.  This is achieved using the following code: <?php header("Location:http://www.othersite.com/otherpage.html"); ?> Unfortunately, however, I could not get this to work for me.  I tried every suggestion and tip I could find on the web to no avail.  Many sites advised making sure to remove any “white space” in the PHP file.  I removed every single bit except the 3 lines listed above, deleted the fourth blank line by going to the end of the third and hitting delete.  No joy. I got in contact with my fantastic web hosting company Webhost.ie and they figured it out.  By default PHP on their servers runs at PHP4.  As soon as the version running was changed to PHP5 in the website settings area the script ran perfectly! So there you go: if you’re having trouble with PHP header redirects check the PHP version number running on your web server .