The most familiar Nigerian scam is an e-mail offering lots of free money in exchange for helping someone with a name like Barrister Richard Okoya. The offer varies, but the theme is the same — help a downtrodden victim recover a large sum of money trapped in an overseas bank, and you will be rewarded handsomely.

But Nigerian scams stretch far wider than e-mails asking for help moving money out of international accounts. In a much more elaborate version of the crime, scammers participate in legitimate online auctions, finish with the high bid, and send along a check to pay for the winnings.

The payment often arrives as a cashier’s check, thought to be good as cash by many U.S. residents. It’s not.

The criminal sends more than the winning amount and asks for some to be wired back. When victims apparently successfully deposit the cashier’s check, they figure the buyer is legit, and wire the overage, often to a bank account in Nigeria. Weeks later, the bank discovers the cashier’s check is bogus, and the depositor is responsible for the missing funds. Often, the victim is out both the merchandise and the money.

In another variation, Nigerians offer to donate money to charities they find online; then, they follow the same tactic. A too-big check is sent and a partial refund requested.

Many Americans have come to realize that wiring money overseas is a bad idea. So several years ago, Nigerians started recruiting U.S. residents as go-betweens, so they’d be able to ask victims to send money or packages to U.S. addresses.

Online classified services like Monster.com are now full of job offers for what are listed as “re-shipping” firms.

There are many more variants of the Nigerian Scam, read more about it on MSNBC

Source: MSNBC

IPods may soon shrink slightly in size, with news that Toshiba has managed to make 1.8-inch drives a little smaller.

Toshiba’s Storage Device division has revised its current range of 1.8-inch hard drives into a new, smaller form factor.

The new casing is available in 60GB, 40GB, 30GB, and 20GB capacities. The 30GB and 20GB models will be.2 inches in height and weigh 1.7 ounces; while the 40GB and 60GB models will be just.3 inches and weigh 2.1 ounces.

Source: PCWorld

In a detailed briefing for analysts in New York on Friday, executives at Advanced Micro Devices painted the company as making “irreversible progress” into new architectures, specifically multicore microprocessors and 64-bit processing.

Executives confirmed that the company plans to enhance its Opteron enterprise processor line to four cores in 2007, adding focused optimizations to manage power and improve throughput.

Going forward, AMD executives said its progress will be defined by metrics like “throughput per watts per dollars”, backed by specific technologies that it will try to establish as industry standards, rather than following rival Intel’s lead.

Source: ExtremeTech

It is well known that you can limit your Google search to one web site, but many times you want a broader search while limiting to specific top level domain.

For instance you might want to limit your search to sites from Israel (.il) or you might want to search all government sites in the UK (gov.uk) or just limit your search to .edu sites.

With the new top level domains approved by ICANN such as (.cat, .jobs, .mobi, .post, .travel, .xxx, .biz, .info and more) your choices are wide. Fortunately Google allows you to do just that using the site: keyword you can search on both single sites or on top level domains.

If you want to search for the word Vatican in sites from Italy (.it) just type “Vatican site:it�? or if you want to search for a W-4 form in government sites just type “w-4 site:gov�?. Of course the standard option to search specific site is still available such as “tip site:aviransplace.com�? which will show you more tips from this site