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Greg Shields

Member since: Jun 26th, 2006

Greg Shields's Latest Comments

Blog Activity
Blog# of Comments
The Digital Music Weblog1 Comment
Switched1 Comment

Recent Comments:

MacBook Air Hacked In Under Two Minutes (Switched)

Mar 28th 2008 10:57AM Um, let's see - 40,000 identified viruses for Windows, zero viruses on Macs, and a very smart security guy socially engineers someone to click on a malicious link to gain control of a machine? As a Mac user, I will continue to use Safari and I will remain smug.

BurnLounge Sells Digital Music Snakeoil (The Digital Music Weblog)

Jun 26th 2006 3:06PM I am not sure about whether this is a pyramid scheme or not, not do I necessarily care, but as a friend of someone that started a store, I thought I might buy something from him to help him out. Here is what I have learned:

1. Only works on Internet Explorer with Windows Media Player 9.0. I guess us users of OSes other than Windows or browsers other than Internet Explorer are out of luck.
2. When I bypass the whole "You are not on Windows and you are out of luck" thing and actually enter a Burn Lounge store, the website then tries to get your computer to connect back to IP 206.71.151.66 on TCP Port 30521. As a rule, I NEVER trust web sites that try to initiate connections without my knowledge, and burnlounge.com would have done just that if I did not monitor that kind of thing and disallow it when it is attempted. Here is the WHOIS on the IP block that address is in:

Whois has started ...


OrgName: Convergent Network Services
OrgID: CNS-100
Address: 51 Tec Street
City: Hicksville
StateProv: NY
PostalCode: 11801
Country: US

ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhoisd.convergentns.net:4321

NetRange: 206.71.144.0 - 206.71.159.255
CIDR: 206.71.144.0/20
NetName: CONVERGENTNS
NetHandle: NET-206-71-144-0-1
Parent: NET-206-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS4.CONVERGENTNS.NET
NameServer: NS2.CONVERGENTNS.NET
Comment:
RegDate: 2004-11-08
Updated: 2004-11-08

RTechHandle: PEM10-ARIN
RTechName: Matuszewski, Paul Edward
RTechPhone: +1-516-620-2559
RTechEmail: paul@inofficenetworks.com

OrgTechHandle: NOC1829-ARIN
OrgTechName: Network Operations Center
OrgTechPhone: +1-631-236-9090
OrgTechEmail: noc@convergentns.net

3. I sent an email to BurnLounge on 6/20 asking why their site was attempting to get my computer to connect to that IP and have still not received a response.

If any "Burn Loungers" can provide explanations to my three concerns about Burn Lounge listed above, I would love to hear them so that I can feel better about buying from my friends store. BTW, he was not able to answer my questions as he is decidedly untechnical.