With the Summer fast approaching, a number of businesses will be looking for seasonal help. In turn, a number of scam artists will be looking to take advantage of those in need of employment. These con men will not just be using the sub-par pages of craigslist to find victims, but will be taking to more legitimate employment sites like Monster and CareerBuilder Recently, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) released their tips on how to avoid being taken advantage of.
Some of the tips include…
Being wary of ads that say “immediate start” “no experience necessary”
Be careful of generic sounding job titles
Go to the company’s website directly rather than clicking on a link
Never give them your financial information
Never give them any money
Look up the business’ location
A job may also be a scam if you are asked to be interviewed in a coffee shop or fast food place if that’s not the job you’re applying for. You should also be wary if you’re asked to be interviewed either in your home or someone else’s. Unfortunately, with these potential job scams, not only is your money at risk but your well-being could be as well.
Yesterday, the President Trump-backed FCC voted 2-1 to overturn the net neutrality regulations the Obama administration had put in place in 2015. Net neutrality basically states all internet traffic should be treated equally and internet service providers should not charge consumers extra for prioritized traffic.
FCC chairman Ajit Pai has stated he believes overturning net neutrality will promote competition between ISPs and will result in more choices for consumers, however, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In most US markets, consumers only have a choice between either their local cable company or their local phone company. In most cases those companies are part of larger conglomerates like Time Warner, Comcast, and AT&T. So if anything, these companies will more than likely offer less actual choice to consumers while raising prices. Instead they will offer tiered services offering faster traffic to popular sites for more money, disguising that option as choice.
Net neutrality isn’t dead just yet, but it’s on life support. The public has 90 days from yesterday to respond to the FCC’s actions, but no matter how rose-colored your glasses may be, it’s unlikely they will reverse their decision to kill net neutrality.
In wake of the recent WannaCry ransomware attack, cryptocurrency Bitcoin has been in the news a lot lately. In a nutshell, Bitcoin is a digital form of currency that is almost completely anonymous. While it can be used for legal and legitimate transactions, Bitcoin does have somewhat of a shady reputation since it’s not only used as the method of payment to unlock ransomware, but it’s also been used as the de facto form of payment in dark web black markets like Silk Road.
The people behind the WannaCry attack have so far claimed close to $100,000 in ransom. That’s not a lot when you consider that they were asking between $300 and $600 for each machine that had become infected that was said to number in the hundreds of thousands. According to NBC News, a number of companies have been stockpiling Bitcoin in order to quickly resolve any ransomware attacks they may become the victims of. Is this good business? Well, yes and no. As mentioned before, there is never any guarantee that the encrypted files will ever be released if the ransom is paid. However, it could be more financially viable for some companies to pay the ransom rather than deploying a battalion of IT workers to hopefully fix the problem. Either way to finding a solution a is a huge gamble and neither of them have any kind of beneficial payoff.
Paying off ransomware may get your files back, but in the long run it encourages more groups to launch more attacks.
Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected an appeal by legally embattled classifieds site Backpage. Backpage had asked the court that the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee should either return, destroy, or refrain from publishing documents the subcommittee received in its investigation into Backpage. Previously a Senate subcommittee had stated that Backpage allegedly had moderators edit ads for prostitution to make them appear more legitimate by having them remove certain keywords that would indicate the person in the ad may be under 18.
Backpage’s behavior has been more than suspicious since the Senate investigation into alleged criminal acts had started. At first Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer completely ignored a Congressional subpoena stating that business he had overseas was more important. Then when Ferrer finally did appear before the Senate subcommittee there was a lot of fifth amendment pleading. This isn’t even taking into account that Ferrer and Backpage founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin are all facing criminal charges in the state of California on pimping and money laundering charges.
So now, the question has to be asked, what is in Backpage’s seized records that they are so afraid of being made public? Is it the proverbial smoking gun that will definitively show that Backpage was knowingly complicit in the sexual slavery of countless women and girls or will it show they were involved in other criminal activity, such as money laundering, because of their involvement in nationwide human trafficking? Lastly, if any type of information like this is revealed, will it finally get the public to wake up to the atrocities Backpage has allegedly been involved in just so they could make a few hundred million dollars?
Video streaming service Netflix is available on just about every modern electronic device known to man. It’s available on laptops, Blu-ray players, video game consoles, smart phones and tablets. Nowadays, you might even be able to stream Netflix on a 1985 Betamax that you found at a thrift store. Netflix recently announced they will no longer support a certain select group of Android devices, and those would be devices that have been rooted by their owners.
Rooting an Android phone means that you can perform a small hack on the phone in order to be able to have more control over the apps on your phone. Most Android phones come with pre-loaded bloatware that can’t be removed from the device by normal means. When you have an Android phone where storage space is at a premium, sometimes you have to root a phone in order to make space for crucial apps that you may need in your everyday life. This is usually due to the phone manufacturers loading their phones with proprietary apps that many users don’t need or use.
While not coming right out and saying it, Netflix is giving the impression they’re blocking these devices in order to fight piracy. While that’s well within their right, it feels like their trying to kill flies with a shotgun. The number of people who root their Android devices are a minuscule amount compared to the number of Android users and the majority of them are only rooting their phones and tablets out of convenience, not for piracy.
By taking this step, Netflix is risking a minor backlash from rooted Android users, but in the long run, Netflix’s numbers are so large they can afford to alienate a number of niche Android users.
Do you work for a company that still uses Windows XP because there’s a crucial piece of business software that only runs on the 16-year-old operating system? If so, your Monday morning may not be the most productive due to a global ransomware attack called WannaCry. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the concept of ransomware, it’s a piece of malware that not only infects your computer, but encrypts your files and does not allow you to access them until you pay the hackers holding your system hostage a ransom that it paid through the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. So far, WannaCry has infected over 200,000 systems in 74 countries including a large Spanish telecom and the National Health Service in the UK. In the US, courier service FedEx has said that a portion of their systems have been infected as well.
The attacks started this past Friday and a security expert was able to find a vulnerability in WannaCry, but since then a new version of the malware has been spotted out in the wild. Since the new version of WannaCry went out during the weekend, a number of companies could be infected and not even know it until they start booting up machines today. The malware was designed specifically to exploit a vulnerability in a number of Windows-based operating systems based on an NSA spy tool that was released to the public by another group of hackers. Windows released a patch for the exploit, even for Windows XP which stopped receiving regular updates from Microsoft in 2014, but many systems unfortunately remain unpatched. Both the US and UK governments are urging those infected with WannaCry to not pay the ransom, which is said to be around $600 USD per infected machine. There is no guarantee that your files will be released once the ransom is paid.
If you are still running Windows XP at home, you’re running a machine that is ripe for the pickings by malware and ransomware. As previously mentioned, since Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft you are no longer receiving any security updates. There are many free to low-cost alternatives to running XP, such as running a more secure Linux operating system. If you’re a business still using XP because the software needed to run your business only works on XP, it is highly recommended that you upgrade to a more current operating system like Windows 10. While it may be saving you money now to keep using the antiquated OS, in the long run it could cost you your entire network. There are simple and low-cost ways to run XP exclusive programs and applications in Windows 10. Lastly, if you think that you’d rather press your luck against such attacks remember this: it only takes one employee to click on one bad attachment to bring your entire operation to a grinding halt.
National real estate listing site Zillow has a feature on their site called ‘Zesitmates’. These Zestimates, as the name implies, are price estimates for real estate listings. According to their website, Zillow says Zestimates are not an appraisal, but are a starting point in determining a home’s value. The Zestimates are based on a proprietary algorithm that takes user provided information and other local prices into account. Sometimes the Zestimate numbers don’t match with the actual value of the home or the price being asked by the homeowner. This sometimes vast disparity in numbers has now led to a lawsuit against Zillow.
An Illinois homeowner has filed the suit claiming Zillow’s estimate was $60,000 less than the home is worth. The suit claims that Zillow determined this valuation by using the prices of newly built homes in their area but not quite in their neighborhood. The homeowner feels the Zestimate has limited the market potential on their home.
Is this lawsuit warranted? Well, yes and no. While it doesn’t appear Zillow has acted with any real malice, they had to know their Zestimates could affect the market values on some homes. While Zillow may claim their Zestimates are only a starting point, they have to know a lot of potential buyers are going to use the Zestimates as a de facto appraisal no matter how many warnings they post.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the concept of net neutrality, it can be best described in this way. Let’s use popular streaming site Netflix as an example. Netflix is a bandwidth hog when it comes to internet service providers. Most users need a pretty fast connection in order to use Netflix. Now say that internet providers started offering tiered services where you had to pay extra in order to get a fast connection to Netflix. Or it could be other popular sites like Facebook or Gmail. Net neutrality says that all internet traffic should be treated equally. Proponents of net neutrality wanted the FCC to regulate ISPs like a common carrier which would prevent ISPs from favoring certain web traffic over others. Opponents of net neutrality don’t want the government interfering with internet in general under the belief that once the government starts regulating the internet they will never stop regulating the internet, leading to accusations of possible censorship. Under the Obama administration, the FCC ruled that ISPs were in fact common carriers, however, under the Trump administration, those regulations have largely been gutted. This is a battle that’s been going on for years but it reached a fever pitch recently when a large salvo was fired against the Trump-controlled FCC the other night.
It all started when political humorist John Oliver started talking to his audience about net neutrality. On his HBO show, he asked his viewers to go to the FCC website and leave their comments about how they feel about net neutrality. This included Oliver promoting a humorous but slightly off-color URL in order to lead his viewers to exactly where they needed to be on the FCC website. This led to so many users flooding the website, that it was basically knocked offline due to all the traffic it was receiving.
This led to the FCC calling Oliver’s campaign a denial of service attack, or DDoS for short. Normally a DDoS attack is a form of cyber-vandalism used in order to intentionally knock a site offline with a flood of traffic. The difference with Oliver’s campaign is that he wanted his viewers to leave legitimate comments. This has led opponents of net neutrality to fire back by launching a number of automated scripts called bots to swarm the FCC’s website, leaving comments in support of the Trump administration’s handling of net neutrality. In case you were wondering, yes that sounds more like a DDoS attack than what John Oliver’s viewers were doing.
Unfortunately, this is the way of the internet. When one side of an argument starts speaking up about an issue, the other side tries to shout them down. In the end, while Oliver’s actions may have been well intended, this will ultimately have no effect on the net neutrality debate, thanks to many of the players involved acting like petulant children.
If you want to make real change about net neutrality, the best way is to write or call your representatives in Congress and let them know how you feel. Congress still operates in an old school way and gives letters and phone calls more weight than e-mails and online petitions. Also, to better get your point across, always be respectful when dealing with politicians whether they deserve it or not. If you’re rude or ranting in your communication with them, your voice will largely be disregarded.
In a recent blog post, classifieds industry watchdog organization the AIM Group, appears to have confirmed some of our suspicions about classifieds apps OfferUp and LetGo. In our blog post about the Forbes article that called us ‘for naught’, we questioned the financial and userbase stats put out by the two apps. While we postulated the use of clickfarms may be involved, AIM Group founder Peter M. Zollman seems to believe the claims of success put out by both apps are fabricated.
Regarding the claims of monetary success from both apps, Mr. Zollman had this to say…
OfferUp “says it will handily surpass $20 billion in goods sold this year, with about half coming from car sales.” (To which we reply: “Oh really? And how do you value transactions when they never take place on the site, when listings are reposted over and over, when your users don’t have any transaction capabilities, and when user visits are no indicator of who’s actually buying or selling?” We don’t take estimates of sales on OfferUp, LetGo and similar sites with a grain of salt; we take them as unmitigated baloney, to use the polite term.)
Mr. Zollman also calls LetGo’s claims that they will facilitate $23.4B in transactions baloney.
With all due respect, the allegedly fictitious claims made by both apps seem to exhibit a desperate attempt to not only please current investors, but also to try to attract new investors in the ever-increasing shell game that is startup funding.
In the run up to Election Day in the UK, Facebook has turned to an unlikely ally in their continuing struggle against ‘fake news’. The social network behemoth has taken out several print ads in UK newspapers on how to recognize fake news.
While the ads do contain helpful information on how to be a more discerning news consumer, it does indicate something Facebook probably won’t admit to itself. Facebook may feel some responsibility for the fake news that many think unduly affected the 2016 US Presidential Election. Thousands of dummy Facebook accounts have also been purged in anticipation of the election.
However, the problem with the fake news argument is certain individuals have such a confirmation bias that they can’t be turned into more responsible content consumers. Take vaccinations for example. It was once claimed vaccinations caused autism, which caused many parents to forgo immunizations for their children. Even though that claim has been discredited many times over, there are still many people who cling to that fallacy.
For many people, politics are their vaccinations. They blindly follow whatever dogma their chosen political party subscribes to no matter who the candidate may be. With those political leanings, many of these people will only read news from sources biased towards their own affiliation. It’s too late for Facebook users like that, they are lost to us.
The only way to combat this kind of ignorance is for those of us who can discern fake news from fact to become more active in political matters and to get out and actually vote.
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