A friend forwarded this to me and asked if I thought it was a good deal:



> http://www.cdcheap.biz/foryou/

>

> Windows XP

> Professional 2002

> $50

> Retail price: $270.99

> Our low Price: $50.00

> You Save: $220.00



These guys appear to be selling pirated software or even worse, collecting credit card numbers.

I dug through my archive of ‘Spam’ and found several messages from them. Several things tell me something is wrong with this deal.

Biggest is their pricing. While Windows XP for $60 is almost believeable, Office XP, Photoshop and Pagemaker at those prices isn’t.

Another is the way they create their links. Rolling over the link with my mouse in my email program shows a link like this:

http://drs.yahoo.com/codfishshanty/syllable/

=mockupperclassmen/*http://www.cdcheap.biz/re/clean.php

Notice the beginning of the link looks like it is a Yahoo store, a nice respectable business. However, you end up at the chcheap.biz sitting out there at the end of the link. Why would they try to hide that?

A third way is a little more technical, I looked up their cdcheap.biz registration information. You can go to http://whois.sc/ and enter cdcheap.biz in the look up box. It returns the name and address of the company that registered that domain. In this case, it is:

Several things wrong here, can you spot them? No street address for Parking St. Zip code looks a little suspect, what are the chances that they are in zip code 12345? And I happen to know that mail.ru is a Russian equivalent to hotmail.com, why would a legitimate business be using a free email service from Russia?

Lastly, I can’t connect to their website, I bet someone else has complained to their webhost and they’ve been disconnected.

As a rule, I ignore all offers from spam or unsolicted email. I get too much that is like this, looking very much like a scam, to even trust ones that look legit from all angles. Unless you get an offer from a company you directly signed up with, I’d reccomend trashing it.

I did a little cosmetic work around here. What do you think?

I also added a few new random images for the top and side. Hit refresh a few times…

I have a ton of pics to post from Wilbur and Lisa’s visit, those will have to wait a bit yet.

Rod Hall placed third in class in Baja, not too bad considering the H2 had only one or two races under its belt. Update: Sam didn’t co-drive this race though he was originally slated to, he helped drive chase. They started out strong, staying right with the rest of the class, but were delayed when they broke a suspension piece. They eased up a bit for the rest of the race. Now they’ve gotta look into how they can reinforce that suspension piece while staying in the stock class… Their teammate Chad Hall placed first driving the original Hummer, thats a vehicle Sam has worked on quite a bit in the past but hasn’t been in his shop lately, the new H2 has been keeping him busy.

The Baja 1000 started this morning. I snagged a couple of pics out of the Off-Road.com photo gallery, they show the H2 waiting for the race to start in Ensenada on contingency row.

I’ll be following the coverage on Off-Road.com and will post anything interesting on Sam and his team as it comes by.

Wilbur, Lisa, Jake and Levi are going to be in town for the weekend, I’ll have plenty more pics to fill up the site.

My brother Sam is in Baja this week to help Rod Hall International take team Hummer H2 across the Baja 1000 finish line.

Off-Road.com is following the race and has posted a pair of articles (1), (2) on team Hummer H2’s progress on taking a stock H2 and transforming it into a vehicle capable of finishing a grueling race like the Baja 1000. What they don’t tell you is that after the engineers were done with the H2 in Arizona it has been in Sam’s shop (in between races) getting outfitted with what Sam and the Halls (Rod, Chad and Josh) feel is necessary to win races.

Sam was in town showing off the race H2 for the SEMA show a few weeks back, I got to visit and snap a few pics of their race H2.

More pictures of babies! On the left is my uncle Joe holding his grandson Seth, on the right is my sister-in-law Christine holding her daughter Isabel.