If you notice tomorrow that your inbox is a little less crowded, it might be because a Seattle jail cell is a little more full.

Federal authorities today arrested Robert Alan Soloway for mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, money laundering, and impersonating the licentious wife of a Nigerian oil minister. (okay, we made that last one up) But they did slam him with a 35 count indictment.

The young internet entrepreneur alledgedly crossed over to the dark side when he used hijacking viruses to take over the computers of unsuspecting internet users. Hunting down vulnerable pcs on local cable networks and DSL, he would (alledgedly) load a remote email module which could be activated at his discretion. This allowed him to steal bandwidth from various ISPs, cable companies. etc. and use their networks to distribute his marketing materials. In his scheme, he not only stole bandwidth, time, attention and resources of his recipients, but also the network resources of his unconscious slave mailers.

“He’s one of the top 10 spammers in the world,” said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company’s Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. “He’s a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day.”

Soloway pleaded not guilty Wednesday afternoon to all charges after a judge determined that — even with four bank accounts seized by the government — he was sufficiently well off to pay for his own lawyer.

He has been living in a ritzy apartment and drives an expensive Mercedes convertible, said prosecutor Kathryn Warma. Prosecutors are seeking to have him forfeit $773,000 they say he made from his business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp.

He continued his activities even after Microsoft won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and the operator of a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment, prosecutors said.

U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said Wednesday that the case is the first in the country in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else’s Internet domain name. Soloway could face decades in prison, though prosecutors said they have not calculated what guideline sentencing range he might face.

The investigation began when the authorities began receiving hundreds of complaints about Soloway, who had been featured on a list of known spammers kept by The Spamhaus Project, an international anti-spam organization.

The Spamhaus Project rejoiced at his arrest.

“Soloway has been a long-term nuisance on the Internet — both in terms of the spam he sent, and the people he duped to use his spam service,” organizers wrote on Spamhaus.org.

Our own Aaron G. has volunteered to serve on the Jury, but will likely be declined due to his regular calls for the death penalty for spammers

Tune in for our upcoming broadcast segment on protecting YOUR PC from zombie overlords.

We spent a couple of days at an interesting internet trade show called DomainFest.

Did you ever notice how often you do a search and find a domain name exactly matching your search term. (eg. SeattleSailBoat.com, click image at right). As often as not you’ll find the page is full of PayPerClick links, Google ads, Yahoo ads etc. You have stumbled into the domain parking industry.

There are three major components in the parking marketplace.

1. Domainers - companies, or from the looks of the attendees - reformed xbox addicts- that own dozens, hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of either targeted or obscure keyword based domain names. (Fabulous.com claims to own over 500000 domains).
2. Domain name parking services - they will take your domains and use backend software to display appropriate advertisements (the ppc/overture/google ads that earn money) and they’ll split any revenue they make with the domainer.
3. PPC companies and advertisers that pay for the whole deal.

My sense is that eventually the search engines will come to see this as clutter and they’ll start to cut these very thin, contentless clickthrough lists out of their search results. But until they do, go grab yourself some cool domains, find a parking company (try parkingpanel.com or fabulous.com) and make yourself a few extra dollars per month.

If you want an excellent domain, you can even finance it through a company called DomainCapital and pay it off over 1-5 years.

Dan Warner of Fabulous advises that you look for domains that have:

• Brandability
• Mindshare
• Commerciality
• Specificity
• Realization
• Immediacy and
• Intent

Check Fabulous where he explains what he means.

We are working on a review of Digital SLR cameras. I just got a new Pentax k100D camera. We will also be reviewing the Canon Rebel XTi, Nikon D80 and the Sony A100k Alpha.

Thoughts about the Pentax k100d:

It comes well packaged, pieces nicely protected. I got it with the 18- 55mm lens kit standard.

I popped in new ultra II sdhc 4.0 GB card from SanDisk, got a memory card error right away. Oh well, nothing technical is supposed to be too easy..

So I registered on line, did a quick google search and found i needed a firmware upgrade. The sdhc is so new, so big, goes beyond the the sd parameters, so the camera needs new firmware to use the high capacity card. I just love a camera that can be altered just by loading new firmware. kudos to pentax.

The process of upgrading the firmware in a Pentax k100D is pretty simple, if you have another old sd card around. You need at least 8mb. SO borrow a friend’s for an hour, or pick one up on ebay for 10 bucks. I borrowed one out of my Minolta Dimage z1.

All you need to do is copy the firmware upate onto the smaller capacity SD card and start the camera while holding down the menu key. It will walk installthe upgrade for you.

To find the upgrade go here:

This Pentax page has the download.
Save the exe file to your computer and run it. Its a self extracting EXE file , it will extract a bin file.

copy the bin file (a binary file with new firmware) onto an sd card. put the sd card in the camera with the power off.

then hold down the menu button on the left back of the camera and hold it while you turn on the camera. it should show you the old firmware version and then show that it is updating.

the camera’s screen has a litle image that says program update yes/ no use the up down arrows near the ok button to choose yes and just wait.
takes a few minutes to load goes through two phases, but has a fine little progress indicator so that you know what is happening. When you are done, take out the old sd card, pop in the new ultra high capacity card and you are off to the races.

Five minutes later i was ready to start learning and testing the camera.

Up and Running with the Pentax K100D

The Pentax k100d Digital SLR (DSLR) camera feels great in your hand. Definitely designed for a righty, with the the built in hand hold on the right side that has become a pretty standard design feature in all but the slimmest of digital cameras. The camera is definitely heavier than a little fixed lens zoom digital like the Minolta Dimage Z series. I’ll weigh them both and post it in another entry later. The balance is fine, no wobble to the camera. You can use it with one hand but definitely more stable with that left hand adding some balance.

I’ve been shooting with a Minolta Dimage Z1 with a 10 times optical zoom, and have mostly been happy with it. But its been just powerful enough to make me want a more substantial, versatile camera. My number one complaint with the simpler camera is stability and vibration. When you try to get an indoor shot, you often get blur or trailing motion. The Pentax is a Rock. Totally stable. No shake, no jitter. It has an anti shake setting. I was able to get ambient light, night time indoor lighting only shots of my daughters sleeping and playing with crisp edges.

Tonite I’m going to try to test another of its stability features: A 2 second delay on the shutter. Why does that matter? I’ve tried a number of times to get a decent nighttime shot of the Downtown Los Angeles Skyline from my deck. But even with a tripod I always get light trails. The Pentax manual suggests the problem might be the subtle rocking of the camera when i push the shutter release button and the internal mirror moves.

The manual suggests that if I use my tripod and the 2 second delay, the camera will have a couple moments to stabilize after i push the button before the image is snapped. I’ll let you know in my next post.

The camera has a batch of preprogrammed scene types where it will optimize its performance. Nighttime scenes, bright snow scenes, text on a page, sunset/sunrise, kids at play, pets, candlelight, and indoor flash prohibited locales like museums and school plays. Aimed right at the sweet spot of parenthood.

Took the camera out with me today to grab some shots and see how it plays out in the real world. Number 1: I love the camera’s speed. I have twin 4 year old daughters, getting them both looking the same direction and smiling can be a challenge. But with the K100d it is a breeze to just keep shooting and shooting figuring at least one picture will just rock. I got a dozen excellent shots today. When we kick this over to the blog and more formal review, we’ll post samples of some of the images.

Picked up some excellent macro shots of fresh picked roses. Clear enough to capture the sheen on the petals. Played a little bit with focus depths and with capturing a sunset sky. Limited by my own skill the camera’s images are stunning.

Okay, you want to read more technical detail here are some useful links:
pentax k100d user manual

Pentax k100d Product Specifications

So far I love the camera. Images are crisp and clean, shake resistance works like a charm, and you can snap lots of images quickly.

My only disappointments so far:

1. I really need a longer lens to get decent images of downtown, sunset etc.

2. I wish I could also take video. My cheap little minolta lets me spin a dial and catch a minute or two clip of decent resolution video. so lots of times i don’t even carry my video camera. the K100d certainly could be engineered to do it, but it just isnt there. Probably enough to keep me from standardizing on this as my main family camera.

Now that we’ve converted TechTalk.net over to a blog, we are going to try a new formula. As we prepare for various segments on the show, we are going to allow our reporters to blog about the equipment or technology that we are testing. These comments will always be works in progress, and we’ll eventually connect back to the audio files of the ultimate broadcast session.

Have fun with them

I know we will

Howard Witkin
Executive Producer

Come meet TechTalk hosts and join our live interviews from the California International Auto Show at the Anaheim Convention Center, October 4-8, 2006.

Join our very own tri-athlete and gear head bike nut Jonathan Tessler live at InterBike in Las Vegas, September 27 - 29, 2006.

Jonathan will be hunting the hottest, and coolest technical innovations in the bike/sports equipment market.

Our favorite bicycle blog.

We’ll be reporting from the NACDS MarketPlace Show in San Diego, looking to see the coming wave of hot technologies in the retail sector.

June 24 - June 27