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…
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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…
Ever wondered why hyperlinks are blue? Well, probably not…but still it is a fascinating read and trip down memory lane (at least for us older folks). Why Are Hyperlinks Blue | The Mozilla Blog Why we need to revisit the origin of blue hyperlink While musing over my recently published article, Why are hyperlinks blue, I was left feeling a bit blue Read more from blog.mozilla.org
It amazes me how inexpensive SSD drives have become. Now Western Digital has M.2 1 TB SSD for under $100. For those who have PC’s either desktop or laptop which can support an M.2 type SSD drive this is a really great an inexpensive upgrade which can boost performance. There are a few M.2 SSDs that are no-brainer upgrades in terms of value and performance and WD’s SN550 was one of them. With 1000GB (1TB) of storage for less than $100 and able to dish out data well above 2,000MB/sec, it made for a fabulous upgrade from a hard disk…
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…
After over a year hiatus, I am finally getting the blog up and running again. The Blog has been moved to a new hosting provider SiteGround and is now served over a secure connection (https). The blog is loading a little slow right now, but the speed should start improving as caching and speed optimization to fully kick-in. After 13-years with GoDaddy, I started parting ways with them back in September 2019 by moving all my domains to a new Registrar, NameSilo. Overall, been impressed with both providers. NameSilo site is very simplistic and has been described as stuck in the…
Long article short, Microsoft is telling people to stop using Internet Explorer. It is old, outdated, doesn’t have the functionality of newer browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) and they have no interest in updating Internet Explorer. Yet, there are many companies (including the one I work for) that seem to be “stuck” on Internet Explorer. In our case, it is not because they can’t find someone to update the coding in the web application to work with a more “modern” browser, rather they don’t want to. When I ran into some issues last month when I was forced to switch over…
Those who have used Google Chrome are already familiar with permission requests when a browser extension is installed. However, this is a relatively new feature in Firefox, which was added with Firefox 57 released in Mid-November 2017. The Mozilla Add-ons Blog gives a very thorough explanation about extension permissions and even address the ‘scary’ Access your data for all websites permission.