Last week when I posted the article about Microsoft’s Biggest Release and seeing the image of all those floppy disks it took me back to my childhood. I honestly have thought floppy disks have gone the way of landlines, VHS and Betamax tapes. Especially considering many kids today only know the floppy disk as the ‘save icon’ not as removable media that was the standard of any PC up until the mid/late 90’s when CD-ROM’s took over. Then I come across an article today discussing how Japan is declaring war on floppy disks for ‘government use‘. Wait Japan?! I would…
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I am not sure if this has been happening in other parts of the country our just in the Phoenix Metro area: PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) — Amazon and Capital One are investigating after Arizona’s Family uncovered a possible fraud scheme last week. The criminal acts seem too similar to be a coincidence. Different men wearing Amazon driver clothes act like they’re dropping off a package but steal a replacement credit card right after FedEx drops it off at Valley homes. This story takes me back to a somewhat similar experience I had happen to me about 4-years ago with credit card…
Yet another ‘if it sounds too good to be true’ deal (such as the Free Microsoft Office Professional Plus in the UK). This time around we have a 30 TB ‘Portable SSD’ for the incredible low price of $39 USD. First red flag besides being unbranded is the $39 price. If this were real you would be spending around $4000 USD for that amount of space. This ‘deal’ appeared on AliExpress as well as WalMart.com (third-party seller). A too good to be true 30 TB SSD Twitter user @RayRedacted (Ray) opted to purchase this ‘deal’ just out curiosity to see…
Password manager service LastPass has notified users their (LastPass) system has been hacked (again). Since 2015 LastPass has its host of security issues, but then again who hasn’t? While LastPass has not ‘advise their users to change their master password (which it is very odd as that precaution is usually what most companies tell their users to do when there has been a ‘security breach’) it still a good idea for users to do this even if it is just out of an abundance of caution. In the announcement sent via email and posted to its blog, the company describes the…
Back in my day when we want to buy software we had to go to a ‘brick-and-mortar’ store to purchase a physical copy of the software on floppy disks; then lug it back home and spend the rest of the day installing said software. Around 30-years ago Microsoft released C/C++ Compiler version 7.0 which holds the record for Microsoft’s ‘biggest’ (in terms of both size and weight) software release. The retail presentation box (yes the software and paper manuals were inside a box on the retailer’s shelf) which came in around 40 to 44 pounds and almost 2-feet tall contained:…
As I had mentioned in the Tech Support and Refund Scams post, many of these scams start with an email claiming to be from e legitimate company. This morning I had several emails from ‘Billing Team’ in my junk folder. Here is one of them below (click the image for full-size). Note: the formatting including highlights is how the email appeared and were not added by me). Besides ending up in my junk folder there were several things I noticed within a few seconds to indicate this was fake and a scam: The return address was ‘Billing Team’ from a gmail.com…
Today I am going to cover something a little different, yet still tech related. This from the ‘dark or evil’ side of tech, the ‘Tech Support’ and ‘Refund’ or ‘Gift Card’ Scams. Both of these while having a different ‘hook’ end the same, hours later the victim is handing over large sums of money (sometimes their entire savings) to the scammer and the scammer has complete access to their computer and/or phone. You may have heard about these and even wondered how they work and for that matter why do people fall for them. At the end of this post…
There has been a lot of news recently involving two of the three big US Wireless (cellular phone) providers, AT&T and Verizon in regards to fully activating their 5G networks and impact on commercial aircrafts worldwide. First off a little background on ‘5G’. 5G or fifth generation is the newest technology standard for broadband cellular networks. It was introduced as a standard in July 2016 with deployment beginning in 2019 and full implementation planned by AT&T and Verizon for early December 2021. Speeds are up to 100 times faster than that of the previous generation (4G,) with a maximum speed…
Found this absurd pending class-action lawsuit this morning via Linkedin news feeds. Google has been sued in a proposed class-action lawsuit that alleges it violated wiretap laws by collecting information about user behavior on the internet without permission while users were in “private browsing,” or incognito mode. Um…apparently these plaintiff’s don’t understand how “private browsing” or incognito mode is supposed to work. Simply put incognito mode prevents someone else who is also sharing the same device (PC, phone, tablet, etc.) as the user from being able to view your browsing/search history that occurred while in incognito mode. This is done by opening…
Forbes’ Gordon Kelly recently did a very comprehensives and honest review of Netgear Orbi WiFi 6 AX6000 mesh router system. I found this very interesting in that echoed issues that we ran into when we moved into our current residence back in 2016. Our Internet incoming connection was feed into one of those OnQ boxes in the master closet. The master closet is about as far away as you can get from the rest of the house. Upon purchasing a new laptop, I quickly discovered I had horrible WiFi reception in the front of the residence. This was long before…