Scamming Senior Citizens

A friend recently told me the story about how his father was scammed, and ended up in a spanish prison for drug smuggling. My own grandmother had been scammed (multiple) times, eventually causing my grandparents to lose their home. In this age of the internet, seniors are huge targets for being taken advantage of, for two main reasons: a) many of them come from an era where they tended to trust people more easily, and b) they are minimally familiar with the internet and how it works. Seniors …

The Resurgence of Email

With the recent example of Amazon’s AWS service arbitrarily killing a business’s website by revoking the company’s hosting contract, the question must be asked – If a service provider can suddenly decide to not provide you service, how can you continue to reach your audience? The short answer is one of the foundational elements of the internet – the original POP… Post Office Protocol. Email. POP servers have (and are) a staple of the internet. They deliver (most) user verification and forgot password emails. They notify people of …

Internet Basics for Small Businesses

This article is intended for small to medium sized businesses and non-profit organizations with limited or no experience with technology and the internet. If you have someone you consider to be your “tech person”, consider reviewing this document with them to get their opinions on each point. If they aren’t very familiar with each point, you may want to have a second “tech person” person involved in decision making to make sure your decisions are well planned and understood. The points below are laid out in order of …

USE A PASSWORD VAULT!

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of technical consulting for individuals and lots of small businesses. The one thing that is almost universal with all of those people is – they don’t use a password vault. But they REALLY need to use one. Why? Because, if someone gets access to their computer, or steals their computer, or hacks it, those people can either lose all of their passwords, or worse, someone can login to many website and do malicious things. (Ya know, log into your bank, transfer …

One-click unsubscribe

Over the years email spam has gotten better and worse. ‘Better’, in that the “Unsubscribe” link that is required by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 has made it much easier to stop unwanted email. ‘Worse’, in that more companies/groups around the world can now get your email so much easier than before, so you actually get more junk email than ever before. Another ‘better’ comes in the form of that wonderful “Spam” (or ‘Junk’) button in Gmail and other web-based email systems. When enough people click that button …

Thanks, Dave

In the era of text messages, email and online profiles, all of our communications are automatically tagged with our identities. Whether by a phone number, or more likely a name programmed into a device that corresponds to a phone number, a name attached to an email account or a name, photo and an ‘About’ page that tells your friends more information about you than most of them know anyway, most communication we have with others in this digital life has been pre-announced, announced and probably even preconceived. So …

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