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  Greg Collier 10:00 am on November 9, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: activation bug, Windows 10 ( 3 )   

  Your Windows 10 Pro license is just fine 

  

  I’ve been a big fan of Windows 10 since it first rolled out to consumers. While Windows 7 had its advantages, I felt Windows 10 was the better operating system since it ran better on the older hardware that I had. That was until yesterday when an older laptop of mine told me that my installation of Windows 10 could not be activated. When I ran the activation troubleshooter I was told that I had Windows 10 Pro was installed on my machine but my license was for Windows 10 Home. I figured this had something to do with some new hardware I installed on my older laptop so I did a fresh install of Windows 10 Home on my laptop. As it turns out you don’t have to do that.

  If in the past day or so you’ve got the message that your Windows 10 Pro installation needs to be activated you can ignore that message for now. Your Windows license is actually fine, it’s Microsoft that’s having the problem. Many tech outlets are reporting that Microsoft is having an issue with their activation servers which is causing this bug for some Windows 10 Pro users. Reportedly, the bug mostly affects users who had upgraded from Windows 7 or 8 while Microsoft was offering the free upgrade to Windows 10.

  Normally, when Windows says it needs to be activated the OS will give you 30 days to obtain a valid license. Hopefully, Microsoft won’t take this long in fixing this latest Windows 10 bug. It is a possibility since Microsoft still hasn’t fixed their previous bug which saw files being deleted with the October Update of Windows 10. That update has been pushed back because of that bug and has not yet been fixed.

  Most consumers probably won’t even see this latest bug since Windows Pro, as the name implies, is designed more for professional users, however. Pro users really do rely on those extra security and remote desktop features. So for now, if you received the activation warning, hold tight and hopefully, Microsoft will have the problem fixed shortly. Although, you may not want to hold your breath in the meantime.

   

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  Greg Collier 10:00 am on November 8, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: craigslist ( 130 ), florida ( 31 ), rental scam ( 92 )   

  Don’t fall for the craigslist copycat rental scam 

  

  On other classifieds sites, there are rental property scams abound. One of the most common scams is that the con artist will copy an ad from a legitimate real estate site, then will repost the ad on a site like craigslist claiming that they are in control of renting the property. Since a lot of people’s first go to site for rental properties may be craigslist scammers will use that site in droves to try to take your money. But what if you see an ad on a real estate site then see an ad on craigslist for the same property at a different price?

  While this is a rare occurrence, a woman from New York was looking to find a rental property in Florida. She first found a property on a legitimate vacation rental site but then found the exact same property for rent on craigslist for a cheaper price. Wanting the better deal, the woman sent money to the person who allegedly placed the craigslist ad. The woman sent $3500 for a rental deposit, the check was cashed and the woman never heard back from the craigslist renter. The alleged con artist also tried this scam on a Canadian family and law enforcement was involved leading to the suspect’s arrest.

  If you see two ads for the same property and the one on craigslist is at a lower price, it’s almost guaranteed that the craigslist ad is a scam. On craigslist the ‘if it’s too good to be true, it probably is’ adage applies more than on any other classifieds site since craigslist doesn’t moderate their ads or submit them to any kind of review process. They only care about the quantity of ads and not the quality.

   
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  Greg Collier 10:30 am on November 7, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Cameroon, Facebook ( 182 ), hate speech ( 14 ), Myanmar ( 11 )   

  The ghosts of Myanmar haunt Facebook in other countries 

  

  With all eyes focused on the US midterm election, Facebook announced in the run-up that they had removed several foreign accounts that were coordinating some kind of inauthentic behavior. What was lost in the headlines is that around the same time, Facebook has admitted to their part in the ongoing ethnic conflict in Myanmar. As has been posted on this blog in the past, the Buddhist majority in Myanmar has used Facebook to not only spread misinformation and hate speech about the Muslim Rohingya minority but have also used Facebook to organize violent attacks against the Rohingya.

  Outside of the announcement of Facebook removing accounts that may have tried to interfere with the US election, Facebook also announced that they admit that their platform was used an “enabling environment” to which ethnic cleansing has proliferated in Myanmar. This was after Facebook had commissioned an independent study to review their role in the continuing Burmese conflict. However, any promise of resolution on Facebook’s side has been vague at best with Facebook basically promising to do better in the future. However, before they can correct any issues in Myanmar, Facebook is being used in another country’s ongoing conflict.

  The African nation of Cameroon is on the verge of a civil war between the French-speaking majority and English-speaking separatists. There are no ‘good guys’ in this fight as both sides have been accused of atrocities against the other. Another thing that both sides of the conflict have in common is that they both use Facebook to discord and misinformation. In one of the more recent incidents, the French-speaking east spread a video of a horror movie on Facebook and claimed it was evidence of cannibalism in the English-speaking east. Even a high-ranking government official claimed this was evidence of atrocities committed by the separatists before the video was debunked. Facebook admitted that there was more to do in Africa but Facebook does not have a team in place in Cameroon but rather handles African content from the US and the UK. This sounds vaguely reminiscent of the crisis in Myanmar as Facebook previously only had a handful of employees that could read Burmese.

  Facebook is losing the global war against hate and has no real-world solutions in place to stop it. This is the problem when one platform dominates the market and tries to be all things to all people. Some of the people are hate-filled monsters with a global platform.

   
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  Greg Collier 10:10 am on November 6, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Election ( 21 ), Facebook ( 182 )   

  Facebook deletes foreign accounts ahead of election 

  

  I know you don’t need another nagging voice telling you to get out and vote if you haven’t done so already but I’m going to say it anyway. Today is probably the most important midterm election in recent history. Whether or not you want things to change or stay the same, it’s imperative that we all get to the polls to make our voices heard.

  Now having said that, guess who is having trouble keeping foreign entities from trying to stir up trouble ahead of the election. I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count. That’s right, it’s Facebook. Yesterday, Facebook announced they’ve suspended over 100 Instagram and Facebook accounts that were acting in a coordinated effort of inauthentic behavior. The suspended accounts were in English, French, and Russian.

  I’ve been using the internet for over 20 years now and in those 2+ decades, I can’t ever remember a time where a platform was used to such great extent in order to influence US voter activity on such a grand scale by international groups. Meanwhile, Facebook is acting like they’re trying to hold back the ocean with a broom as they suspend handfuls of accounts when the number of interfering accounts probably numbers much higher.

  To be quite honest, you probably shouldn’t allow your political views to be influenced by what’s on Facebook anyway. Facebook is the world’s megaphone letting anyone shout their opinion from the rooftops no matter how misinformed or misguided it might be, and all we have is people shouting at each other with no one listening. And when no one is listening no one can be truly informed.

   
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  Greg Collier 10:00 am on November 5, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: advertising ( 11 ), Facebook ( 182 ), hate speech ( 14 ), The Intercept   

  Facebook apologizes for hate speech ad targeting 

  

  why is it that Facebook can’t seem to go at least a week without having to apologize for something. If it’s not massive data breaches and hacks, it’s interference from foreign agitators. One has to wonder if there is a Facebook employee whose official title is Executive President In Charge of Public Apologies. Then again, the way Facebook has been going lately they may need an entire department for that. This week is no different as once again Facebook finds themselves having to apologize for something that had little to no oversight.

  Last week I posted about how news outlets VICE and Business Insider were able to buy phony Facebook ads claiming to be from US Senators and Cambridge Analytica. This week is no different as over the weekend Facebook apologized for yet another advertising faux pas. Another news outlet called The Intercept was able to purchase an ad on Facebook that could be targeted at people who have anti-Semitic views. By using the term anti-Semitic I’m being rather generous as the ads could be targeted using certain phrases that decorum dictates I won’t use here. Facebook blamed the ad category on Facebook’s advertising algorithm for creating the offensive category, however, The Intercept claims that the ad had to be approved by a human moderator. The Intercept placed this ad in order to show just how easy it is for hate groups to be able to promote their vile messages on the platform.

  This isn’t the first time Facebook has been caught allegedly coddling extremist hate groups as Motherboard discovered back in September that ads for white supremacy are not allowed on Facebook while posts that advocate white separatism and white nationalism are allowed. These controversies are just symptoms of much larger and more disturbing problems. Either Facebook’s own platform is grown so large it’s out of their control or Facebook courts controversy in order to keep it’s shrinking userbase engaged. Neither problem is better than the other but both show that Facebook wields more power in our society than they’re capable of handling.

   
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  Greg Collier 9:22 am on November 2, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: data breach ( 33 ), Facebook ( 182 ), security ( 46 )   

  Your Facebook account and messages could be sold for just ten cents 

  

  Ever since the major security breaches happened at Facebook, the social media titan has been trying to assure us that no sensitive user information has fallen into the hands of bad actors. However, it may be just now that we’re starting to see the veracity of those claims. When the accounts of hundreds of millions of users have been exposed, you have to expect at least some fallout from the exposure. Let’s revisit Facebook’s most recent hack that exposed somewhere between 30 and 50 million users.

  Now, the BBC is reporting that the private messages from over 80,000 Facebook accounts are being sold on the open market. While the majority of the accounts belong to users in the Ukraine and Russia, there are US and UK accounts listed among them. The bad actors in possession of this information were trying to sell each account for ten cents a piece. The BBC claims to have verified with some of the exposed users that the messages are in fact genuine. The hackers also claim that the 81,000 accounts are just a small sample of a larger cache that contains 120 million accounts.

  Not surprisingly, Facebook is trying to deflect blame from themselves, instead blaming the compromised accounts on malicious third-party browser extensions. That may be all well and good but when you put the words Facebook and hacked together it’s still Facebook who is going to take a lion’s share of the blame no matter how you look at it. Considering they’ve allowed close to 350 million accounts to be exposed in the past year is laying blame at their feet really that much of a stretch?

   
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  Greg Collier 9:15 am on November 1, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Scams ( 1,663 ), social security ( 31 ), spoofed calls ( 10 )   

  Be careful of the Social Security spoofing scam 

  

  With just about everyone owning a smartphone today we’ve all experienced a spoofed call. Normally these calls disguise themselves as being from a local number. Fearing it may be a neighbor or loved one in distress we answer the call only to find out it’s either a robocall or a telemarketer that’s not even from your local area. A scam that uses the spoofing method of disguising a phone number is targeting the elderly.

  According to the Social Security Administration, scammers are not just posing as Social Security employees but they’re also disguising their phone number to make it look like their calling from the national Social Security office. The number that appears on a phone’s caller ID is 1-800-772-1213 which is the national customer service number for Social Security. If someone were to answer the call the scammer would more than likely promise to increase the victim’s Social Security benefit if they could just get more information from the victim. The caller may even start to get belligerent if you don’t provide them with the information they’re looking for. Of course, this is all designed to gather your personal information to either sell your personal information to the highest bidder or use it to steal your identity.

  In the rare instances that Social Security will call one of its recipients, they will never promise to increase your benefits nor will they threaten you. Even if you think the call is legitimate, hang up, and call the SSA back by manually dialing the customer service number listed above. The SSA also recommends that if you receive one of these calls to report it to the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General at 1-800-269-0271 or on their website.

   
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  Greg Collier 9:11 am on October 31, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Election ( 21 ), Facebook ( 182 ), politics ( 16 ), VICE News   

  Has Facebook made any progress in stopping election meddling? 

  

  Ever since the 2016 Presidential campaign, Facebook has been under fire for allegedly allowing foreign influencers to post deceptive ads designed to agitate the political scene in America. Since then Facebook has made claims that they’ve made strides in verifying who has paid for political ads and have removed several accounts thought to belong to Russian and Iranian groups looking to further interfere in the democratic process. So with the midterm elections less than a week away, Facebook must be all good right? Well, as you can probably expect, not so much.

  VICE News recently published an expose on just how well Facebook is screening their political ads. VICE paid for 100 political ads on Facebook posing as all sitting US Senators. All 100 ads were approved by Facebook showing that just about anybody with the time and money can allegedly pay for any ad they want posing as whoever they want. Building off of VICE’s idea, Business Insider took another tact by buying an ad posing as Cambridge Analytica, the embattled firm that allegedly exposed millions of Facebook users’ information. Again, the ad was approved by Facebook with no problem.

  This is just further proof that no one should have their political views influenced by what they see or read on Facebook. Between your hyper-partisan friends who post meme after meme that reinforces their position no matter how wrong they might be, and the fact that just about anyone can buy an ad on Facebook posing as anyone and saying anything, Facebook has lost the fight to be considered a useful tool in political discourse. Anymore, Facebook just exhibits that it’s become the public restroom wall of the nation covered in the graffiti of misinformation.

  Facebook apologizes for hate speech ad targeting | Greg's Corner is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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  Greg Collier 11:02 am on October 30, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: craigslist ( 130 ), kansas city ( 4 ), rental scam ( 92 ), Scams ( 1,663 )   

  Real Estate agent saves renters from scam 

  

  Online con artists are always changing and adapting. That’s part of why the term ‘con man’ is actually short for ‘confidence man’. When the general public starts catching on to one scheme, con artists will tweak the scam ever so slightly that it almost becomes a brand new scam. For example, in the past scammers would list a property for rent in craigslist that isn’t there’s and would use various excuses as to why you had to wire them the deposit money before even seeing the property. Some of the more popular ones were that the ‘landlords’ were leaving the country either because they were church missionaries or they were in the military having just been deployed.

  It’s rare when I hear about a new rental scam but today seems to be that day. In the Kansas City area, a Real Estate agent saved a family from losing out on their money after one of the realtor’s property was listed on craigslist. The renters were about to send money to someone in Texas who was claiming to be the landlord of the property. The phony landlord claimed they were having problems with the realtor and decided to rent the house out themselves. Luckily, the renters called the realtor before sending any money. The realtor informed the renters that the scammers had copied the realtor’s ad and reposted it on craigslist, which is usually the heart of the scam.

  Rental scams are one of the most prolific scams on classified sites that don’t monitor their ads. Usually, the scammers try to rope you in with a too good to be true price and some kind of story designed to lower your defenses. If you’re ever unsure about who is truly renting a property you can always check with the county assessor’s website or office. Taking that little extra step could mean the difference between finding a new home or losing that down payment you needed for a new place.

   
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  Greg Collier 10:05 am on October 29, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: California ( 21 ), lawsuit ( 48 ), Mozilla, net neutrality ( 32 )   

  California to hold back on net neutrality, for now 

  

  California Gov. Jerry Brown

  Always being the trendsetter, the state of California recently passed the most stringent net neutrality laws in the country, defying the edict handed down by the FCC stating that states could not enforce their own net neutrality laws. When the FCC repealed net neutrality protections for consumers they also issued an edict that the individual states could not make their own laws regarding net neutrality which many see as an abuse of power by the FCC. After California Governor Jerry Brown signed California’s net neutrality into law, not only was the Golden State sued by the Trump Administration and a consortium of broadband providers. But now, a third lawsuit has arisen which has caused California to take pause.

  California’s net neutrality was supposed to go into effect on January 1, 2019, however, this past Friday the state of California announced they would be holding off on enforcing net neutrality until a certain lawsuit is settled. Mozilla, the non-profit behind the Firefox browser, is suing the FCC stating that their repeal of net neutrality protections “violates both federal law as well as harms internet users and innovators.” To put it in simpler terms, Mozilla is claiming that it’s beyond the FCC’s scope of powers to interfere with a state’s rights to pass their own legislation on net neutrality.

  So, this isn’t a defeat for net neutrality in California. The state is merely awaiting the outcome of Mozilla’s lawsuit before determining how to move forward with net neutrality as the Mozilla lawsuit could have national ramifications on the states’ rights to enforce net neutrality. Once again, I find it ironic that an administration that supposedly champions states rights is so quick to try to quash those rights when it goes against financial backers who helped get them to the office, to begin with.