AT&T - Sorry, we did not understand your response. Reply ONLY the word YES to activate the 4 channel/$6 Mobile TV plan

If you ever receive a message similar to this:

AT&T:
AT&T Free Tip: Get weather, movie or restaurant
tips from Google on your phone.
Text HELP to 466453 to get started.
To end Tips send no to 4436

Be careful. I replied by sending "No" to 4436 and got this back:

From: 4436
"Sorry, we did not understand your response. Reply ONLY the word YES to activate the 4 channel/$6 Mobile TV plan"


Did you notice anywhere in the original message anything related to a mobile TV plan?

No, because it was just a free tip from AT&T

The first message is a bait to get you in contact with some vendors and the second message is an attempt to make you subscribe to a mobile TV plan for $4

The only way to stop this annoying messages (which BTW came marked as "URGENT") is to reply with the word "Stop"

I sent Stop to 4436 and got this message back:

FROM: 4436
AT&T AUTO REPLY: You have Opted out of AT&T marketing messages. Please do not REPLY to this message.

How lame for any company to try to trick it's customers to sign in for a subscription this way.

UPDATE: After some time, the messages resumed; I ended up calling customer service and had them remove me from their marketing list. I had to call twice and tell them these messages were in violation to the CAN-SPAM act before the messages actually stopped.


THE CAN-SPAM ACT

In 2003, Congress passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act, which makes it illegal to send unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to wireless devices, including cell phones and pagers, without first receiving the consumer's permission. The CAN-SPAM Act works together with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which created the National Do Not Call Registry.

Creating a self extracting encrypted archive with 7zip

This is a walk-through on how to create a self extracting archive that is encrypted. This is a good way to add security to a file you need to email. What does that mean?

self extracting – a file that will uncompress and unencrypt itself when you double click it

archive – a compressed file containing all the files you need to protect. Compression helps you get by the pesky limits set by gmail etc where you can only send a 20MB attachment. If you have some excel data or word docs you can usually decrease the size by 5-10X.

encrypted – this will encrypt with the AES256 algorithm. The longer the password you use, the more secure it is.

This assumes you have 7zip installed. To check, right click on any file. If 7zip is in your menu like in the screenshot below, it is installed. If you do not, click this link which will pop up a new window with a walk through video on installing 7zip.

To get started -

Put the files in a folder that you want to encrypt.
Open the folder containing the files, drag your mouse across all the files, and right click. Look at this picture:

So Right click

7zip

click Add to archive

The 7zip window should come up. You need to check the following settings:

Add a name.exe

Check Create SFX archive – the self extracting part

Enter a password, the longer the better, numbers and special characters add a lot to the security of the file. I can break into a file with 5 characters in a few minutes. 8+ characters with a letters, numbers and a special character are ideal. A sentence is even better.

Check show password if you want.

Leave encryption at AES-256 and Check encrypt file names.

Hit Ok

This will create your encrypted .exe file in the folder with your files.

Now you need to rename the file.

Now select the file. You should be able to see the extensions like .txt .docx .xlsx .exe. If you can’t click here for instructions on how to have those show up.

Right click on your .exe file and click rename. (or click the file and hit F2 for the fast nerd way to rename)

Erase the .exe part and hit enter. Te 7z icon should disappear and a blank page of paper icon should be there.

Now just open your email, attach the file and send it to the person who needs it. Don’t ever put the password in the email or you defeat the purpose of doing this. The best way is to call the person and tell them what the password is.

When the recipient of the email saves the file, they need to add .exe back to the name using this same rename process. We can’t send .exe files in email because viruses would be everywhere if you could do that.

From: http://windowsnerd.com/how-to-for-normal-people/creating-a-self-extracting-encrypted-archive-with-7zip/

Reviewing File Server Limits

Updated: March 28, 2003

As you plan your file server configuration, keep in mind file system, storage, and other limits related to file servers. Table 2.10 describes these limits.

Table 2.10 File System, Storage, and File Server Limits for Windows Server 2003

Description	Limit
Maximum size of a basic volume	2 TB
Maximum size of a dynamic volume	2 TB for simple and mirrored (RAID-1) volumes. Up to 64 TB for spanned and striped (RAID-0) volumes. (2 TB per disk with a maximum of 32 disks per volume.) Up to 62 TB for RAID-5 volumes. (2 TB per disk with a maximum of 32 disks per volume and 2 TB used for parity.)
Maximum number of dynamic volumes per disk group	1,000 A disk group is collection of dynamic disks. Windows Server 2003 supports one disk group per server.
Maximum size of an NTFS volume	232 clusters minus 1 cluster Using a 64-kilobyte (KB) cluster (the maximum NTFS cluster size), the maximum size of an NTFS volume is 256 TB minus 64 KB. Using a 4-KB cluster (the default NTFS cluster size), the maximum size of an NTFS volume is 16 TB minus 4 KB.
Maximum file size on an NTFS volume	16 TB (244 bytes) minus 64 KB
Maximum number of files on an NTFS volume	4,294,967,295 (232 minus 1 file) There is no limit to the number of files that can be stored in a folder. For recommendations on limiting the number of files stored on a volume, see " Determining Maximum Volume Size" later in this chapter.
Maximum number of clusters on an NTFS volume	4,294,967,296 (232)
Maximum volumes per server	Approximately 2,000 volumes. Up to 1,000 of these volumes can be dynamic volumes; the rest are basic volumes. Boot times increase as you increase the number of volumes. In addition, you must use mounted drives to access volumes when all drive letters on a server have been used. For more information about mounted drives, see " Using NTFS mounted drives" in Help and Support Center for Windows Server 2003.
Maximum number of shared folders on a server	Varies. The number of shares on a server affects server boot time. On a server with typical hardware and thousands of shares, boot time can be delayed by minutes. Exact delays depend on server hardware. Shared folder information is stored in the system hive of the registry. For systems with less than 800 MB of RAM, the System hive can be as large as one-quarter of the physical memory. For systems with more than 800 MB of RAM, the maximum size of the System hive is 200 MB. If the system hive exceeds this limit, the server cannot mount the registry at startup and Windows Server 2003 cannot start.

For information about optimizing NTFS performance, see the Storage Technologies Collection of the Windows Server 2003 Technical Reference (or see the Storage Technologies Collection on the Web at http://www.microsoft.com/reskit).

From: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc780559%28WS.10%29.aspx

Recovery of MS Office Files from Temp Files

Microsoft Office has extensive AutoSave and Auto Recovery options that allow you to rescue your work in the event that it is lost due to a power failure, system crash or plain human error. However many people don't know how to use these features or that they even exist.

Even if you don't have these features enabled, you can sometimes recover data from the various temporary files that are created by Office while you are working on the document.

Microsoft have changed the way AutoSave and Auto Recover works in different versions of Office. Therefore you may want to experiment before you rely on this information.

Finding the Temporary Files

When a new file is started a temporary file is created. This can be either in the windows temp directory, in "C:\ Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft". If the file is stored on a network drive then it will be temporarily created there.

This temporary file will have a few different letters after the tilde (or squiggly line “ ~”) . These are good ones to look for to find some lost info:

Word

If you are looking for files used by word, then the following file types should be searched for, where "xxxx" is a number.

• A word document file will look like ~wrdxxxx.tmp
• A temp document file will look like ~wrfxxxx.tmp
• An auto recovery file will look like ~wraxxxx.tmp
• An auto recovery file that is complete will have the extension of .wbk.

PowerPoint

The temp file for PowerPoint looks like pptxxx.tmp

Excel

The temp file for excel looks like ~dfxxxx.tmp

There are others, but these are the ones most likely to contain data that can be recovered.

Finding and using the temporary and auto save files

Word

The default auto save time for word documents is 10 minutes. You can control this time in Options under the "Save" tab. The auto save files are placed in one of the following two locations, which is where you should look to recover the data.

1. "C:\ Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft\Word".
2. "C:\ Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temp"

When you have found a file that looks like it might contain data, you may want to open it in notepad instead of trying to get Word to reassemble it. The easiest way to do this is to open Notepad from the start menu then drag and drop the file in to it. The file will then be opened so that you can view the contents.

If the document was open when the system failed (power failure or crash) then you could try just opening Word again (not the document, just Word itself from the start menu). Word will then try to recover the lost document.

Excel

Excel doesn't have the AutoSave feature enabled as default, you have to add it. This is because it isn't always practical to have this functionality enabled. If you have it enabled and want to experiment with a spreadsheet, you should create a copy then open that so that the AutoSave doesn't overwrite the original.

To enable the AutoSave feature, you have to use an Add In. Go to "Tools" "Add ins" and choose "AutoSave".
With Office XP, AutoSave has been moved out from Add Ins to Options, in a similar way to Word. You will find the settings under "Save" where you can also disable the Auto Recover feature for that particular work book.

Excel automatically saves every 10 minutes to the default location of "C:\ Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temp" The files are identifiable as they are saved as a number .tmp e.g. "28.tmp". This means that they look different from word or any other temporary files that are being saved there by other applications.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint Auto save feature is enabled as default and will save every 10 minutes. It will prompt you for a file name the first time the auto save runs.
If you are looking for the temp files for PowerPoint then the naming convention is pptxxx.tmp (where xxxx is a number) and they are saved by default in "C :\ Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temp".

Other Useful Information

If you have been working on a file for hours and the document was created via copying and pasting or at one point had cut the entire page or document to paste some place and then placed something else on the clip board, the data may not have been lost. This is because when any info is copied it is sent to a temp file with the name ~wrlxxxx.tmp. Therefore you could search your system for files of this name and then use the same "Drag and Drop" technique to view the data in Notepad to recover the data.

Another interesting thing to note is that when a change is made to a document that requires a temp file to be created, when you press the save button all the temp files are merged together into one file and the file is renamed to what you called it. The original document that you created is then deleted.

Source: http://www.amset.info/tips/office-recovery.asp