A quickie…but seven rip offs to be aware of this holiday season! You can find details on them here: LINK . 1. Holiday shopping clubs and “bait and switch”, slow delivery, broken items. Do your research! 2. Breyers ice cream that isn’t… “Frozen Dairy Dessert”. 3. Solar panels…which are defective. Guess where they were made. 4. Special “Legendary” liquors and liqueurs… legends in bluff: Benedictine and “Legend of Kremlin”. 5. Overpayment scams: You sell ...
Not online yet, but here’s something extensive…potentially great and potentially confusing. All-in-all, good. So, what is it? It’s a scanner you download. It then takes a snapshot of all the active files in use, and those with the ability to automatically execute by means of an auto-start procedure (like an extension, task, etc.). This report is (supposed) to be stripped of any identifiers and is sent to Project herdProtect for analysis. At that point 68 (yep, ...
Millions of people who shopped at Target on or around Black Friday (Thanksgiving through December 6th) have probably had their Credit/Debit card info compromised. The Secret Service is investigating. Apparently some 40,000,000 people may be affected. You had to have physically shopped at a Target store to have this happen to you. Please check tour credit/debit report everyday. The longer you let it go, the less likely any fraudulent charges will be forgiven. Source: ...
I love reading about this stuff because I learn a good deal, but also see that there won’t be any victory over this scourge which constantly mutates, just like antibiotic resistant germs. I’m amazed that Darwin’s principles apply even here. The report discusses how botnets are spreading despite high profile take downs and how they are spreading the as yet unconquerable (irreversible) Cryptolocker ransomware. It also talks about how spam has learned to disguis...
“Threshold” is rumored to be the next in the coming waves of Windows updates…especially since “W8" and “Blue” were welcomed less than enthusiastically. This upcoming version is rumored – rumored to have a functional Start Menu, although no one can really verify this. Logically, it would seem to be the smart thing to do…something like Start 8 would be a true blessing. There are also those who believe it will have ModernMix&...
The Guardian put out news of some interesting research . What we always felt instinctively is true. Men are wired for perception and coordinated action (as you’d expect in a hunter) while women are wired for social skills and memory. This can be seen in the more numerous links between the right and left sides of the brain in females as opposed to males. The neural maps (connectome maps) were observed using diffusion tensor MRI imaging. Here are the maps (men in blue women ...
The idea which motivates this site is preventing weak passwords. So…while I hope you do have super strong, site unique passwords, now there’s a place where you can test that. What’s spooky is that the site seems to read your mind: “The new project from Microsoft Research has a simple premise: you start typing one of your favorite passwords in its little text box, and it tries to guess what the next character is. And it's better at that than you might think.” – Gi...
On Neowin , Brad Sams has notified on some ugly news: “Over two million passwords for Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others have been posted to the web after a botnet has infected thousands of machines and used a keylogger to obtain passwords. While this breach is not from any particular service, the botnet has clearly been running effectively for some time as it reportedly has over 2 million passwords, 300,000 of which are for Facebook accounts.” So, if you...
We shop all year long. We’re addicted to it (some more than others)…men hate it, women love it (let the generalization slide, it’s true). I read an interview with Kim Yarrow, Ph.D. in Medscape about this, and found it interesting. “I just finished a new book on that subject, Decoding the New Consumer Mind , so a short summary might be hard! I suppose if I were to narrow it down to the one most important thing, I would say that buyin...
Please be careful folks. Many of us shop online and use such mega outlets as Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target, Toys R Us and delivery services such as FedEx, UPS and DHL. The scammers will be sending out phony delivery confirmation notices, and ads especially those with attachments like html and pdfs. Mouse over those links and examine them! If the offers are too good to be true, they are. If you go to those pages, you risk malware infection. These aren’t theoretical dan...
Everyone should have this one, probably. It supports all Windows OSs from XP on. It prevents the installation of toolbars, Java, home page and search engine switchers, etc. It isn’t perfect. Not 100% of the time. So, you’ll have to pay attention. It will bring you to the “custom installation”, but pay attention in case it doesn’t. I’d also bet that the sites which “wrap” or “bundle” software with other stuff are at work trying to figure out how to circumv...
It turns out that the massive hack which was perpetrated on Adobe has had ‘downstream’ repercussions. Evernote is the latest to inform its customers about possible effects of the Adobe hack. If you received an email from Evernote (check your spam folder!) please follow the recommendations below: “There were published reports recently of a security breach at Adobe that may have exposed private information, including Adobe passwords, email addresses and passwords...
I was casting about for stuff to apprise you of when I realized that I haven’t done anything for the Mac folks in a very long time, and that made me feel crappy. So, over at Lifehacker I saw this… it’s not free, it costs $8 (which isn’t bad)…but it’s free to try. Which isn’t bad at all since you can save all your mods and trade them with other Mac folks (though like with WB, etc. you’d need the proggy to apply the skins). You can check it out and download it here: http://...
We’ve all had the situation of “Program Not Responding” wait or end it…except even choosing to end some doesn’t. Here are five task killers which will do it for you in Windows, Android and Linux. The source of this is here: LINK . each app has a mini review, and the article really is worth looking at. Process Hacker and Extended Task Manager look good…but I don’t want to have to start with “compatibility mode” so Process...
Well…Google does come creepily close to “wrong!” in its ads as well in its network spying while photographing surroundings. They say they don’t actually read the email…but their ‘scanning’ isn’t to be taken lightly. So, MS wants a bigger market share for “Bing”. Imagine if they called it, “Bang!” or “Bam!”? To help get that share (they say Google decreased 10% and Bing increased 7%) they’ve started marketing merchandise. You can see it here . There’s a video here , as we...