21 May 2021

When You Are The Support Department For Friends And Family

Those who know more about how computers work than their friends and family do are often called on to answer questions and provide help. If your friend or family member lives next door or down the street, a house call is good. But what if that person is halfway across the country?

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Even nearby friends and family can be problematic as we continue to deal with the covid pandemic, so using a utility to connect your computer with theirs is essential.

In the very old days I sometimes needed to provide support, but programs to connect computers were unknown back then. The person providing support had to depend on the person receiving support to report what they were doing when the problem occurred, to describe the exact error conditions, to report the text from any error messages they've seen, to follow the instructions exactly, to report what they saw accurately, and not to do anything they haven't been asked to do.

• Have you changed or updated anything or have you installed any new applications? The most common answer is NO, but then later you find that four Windows updates have been installed, half a dozen applications have been updated, and two new programs have been added — one of which contained a virus. So no, of course "nothing" has changed.
• What error message did you see? Oh, it said there was a problem with something, but I didn't write it down.

So in general, you're starting with no useful information. That's still the case today, but it may be possible to replicate an error so that you can see what happened if you have an application that lets you view the computer screen.

Most users will accurately perform any actions requested, but all too often they perform extra steps they think might be useful, or they anticipate what they think you'll ask them to do and accidentally make the situation worse.

By the way, if you've ever wondered how tech support works, web comic xkcd created the most accurate description I've ever seen many years ago. It was accurate then and it is accurate now.

I See What You Did There!

Fortunately, there are several applications that allow those of us who provide support, either commercially or free for friends and family, to see exactly what happened and to work on the computer as if we were sitting in front of it.

Several programs allow one person to see another person's computer screen and to have at least some control over the mouse and keyboard. Let's consider TeamViewer, AeroAdmin, and Zoom. I had used the free version of AeroAdmin for several years, but I encountered a problem in 2020 that caused me to switch to TeamViewer instead. After using TeamViewer for six months or so — a total of three or four uses — I decided that it is entirely unworkable and reverted to AeroAdmin.

Both of these applications allow for limited free usage. TeamViewer says that it cannot be used for commercial purposes. AeroAdmin allows free use for commercial purposes, but limits the time permitted. TeamViewer's least expensive plan costs $612 per year. AeroAdmin's least expensive plan costs $90 per year. All I need is a system that allows me to connect to a friend's computer on rare occasions to assist with a computer problem. Ninety dollars per year is too much, and a plan that's nearly seven times more expensive is entirely out of the question.

Those who provide support commercially may find that TeamViewer's features are worth the price. On the other hand, AeroAdmin packs a lot of functionality into its least expensive offering, and even its free offering.

A friend is a big fan of TeamViewer, so I followed all of the rules when I switched to it last year. I signed up to create an account that TeamViewer presumably uses to determine whether a user is overstepping the bounds of free use. I had used TeamViewer once late in 2020 or early in 2021 for a session that took a little less than an hour. Everything worked exactly as it should.

Then, after several months of not using TeamViewer at all, I needed to connect to another friend's computer. The connection started normally, but it was terminated four minutes later with a warning about commercial use. I could reconnect, but four-minute sessions aren't very efficient. I had decided to dump TeamViewer, but I hadn't decided what to replace it with.

After all, this is a capability I need just a few times a year.

In late April, I needed to connect to a friend's computer to help him resolve some problems with Windows updates and to see if I could figure out what went wrong with his Mozilla Thunderbird email application. Instead of TeamViewer, I decided to use Zoom. He has a commercial account because he uses Zoom for his business and I have a free account that I use hardly ever, and mostly for family calls. Zoom allowed him to share his screen and for me to request control of the screen, so it seemed like it would be a workable solution.

But no. Zoom hides User Access Control warnings and disallows mouse control for some applications. As a result, I had to depend on my friend to watch for and respond to UAC warnings, and I had to ask him to close some dialog boxes and click far too many menus and buttons. I knew what I needed to get done to investigate his computer problems, but I had to explain to him what to click. It was frustrating for both of us.

Using Zoom, I talked him through the process of downloading and installing AeroAdmin. And when we connected, I had full control of his computer. I was able to run Microsoft's diagnostic apps. I downloaded, installed, and ran other utilities that made diagnosing the problem quick and easy. Later I needed to transfer a file from my computer to his. That's a feature the free version of AeroAdmin doesn't support, but the workaround was easy: I uploaded the file from my computer to the TechByter website, installed Filezilla on his computer using AeroAdmin, connected to the TechByter server using Filezilla, and downloaded the file to his computer.

I deem TeamViewer to be unacceptable for free noncommercial use. Zoom is hopeless for anyone who needs to control someone else's computer. AeroAdmin is the hands-down choice for a free application, but I did mention limitations. What are they?

The free version of AeroAdmin (which, unlike TeamViewer, can be used for personal or commercial applications) has a limit of 17. Not 17 minutes. Seventeen HOURS per month. Considering I need to connect to someone's computer to help with a problem no more that about once every few months, it's unlikely that I'll run afoul of that limit.

There are some nice-to-have features in the paid version ($90 per year instead of TeamViewer's $612 per year), but the free version is more than enough for my limited needs.

Check out each of the options I've described: AeroAdmin, TeamViewer, and Zoom.

Short Circuits

Would You Follow A Link In This Message?

Spams and scams fascinate me and the approach I take with them often involves analysis of where a scammy email has come from and where links would take someone who clicks the link. Few people will want to take that much time to analyze something even if they know how. As I told a friend who got sucked in to a scam involving his bank, any email must be assumed to be a con until it proves that it's not.

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So take a look at this email. Would you click the link to get the promised "over $400 value" gift card? I have obscured my email address. It's already known to at least 90% of the scammers on the planet, but there's no point in exposing it to the other 10%.

The single most important protection against being scammed is not hardware or software, but wetware — the stuff we have between our ears — and skepticism. What can we learn using only our eyes and our brain? The message has six tells:

1. The email is from contact@gaqknmnhpkgbh.com. If that address doesn't raise your hackles, or at least a bit of suspicion, it should. It may not be much of a surprise to learn that this domain does not exist. It's dead simple to make a message look like it came from anywhere. It's also easy to examine the message in a way that shows what its exact point of origin was, but I'm limiting this to just what can be seen and surmised by looking at the email. So look again at the sender: "Jessica - Surfin". There's a hyphen between Jessica, presumably her name, and Surfin — as in "surfing". Alarm bells should be quite loud by now and we're not even past the sender's address.
2. There's a meaningless "confirmation" ID: OIP5OIP5. What's the likelihood that any legitimate confirmation ID will consist of a sequence of three letters and a number followed by the same three letters and a number? It's possible, of course, just as a random number generator will eventually create a sequence containing nothing but sixes. But it's unlikely. Very unlikely.
3. The message was sent shortly before midnight, so when I opened the message at 6am, six of the 24 hours referred to had already passed. That's not the only problem with the line that says "Over $400 in value. Expiring in 24 hours time. Hurry and continue below." A gift card will have a specific value, not just "over $400". Saying that something expires soon is used to create a false sense of urgency. When we humans respond to urgency, we sometimes forget to think critically.
4. The COLLECT HERE button is in a message from someone I don't know at an unfamiliar address, so the first rule for links is DO NOT CLICK. Hovering the mouse over the link shows that it goes to https://storage.googleapis.com/topinal/go.html. You don't have to do that, of course, but if you do, the link looks like it might legitimate. Is it? Well, the prime directive (to borrow a term from Star Trek) supersedes everything, so don't click even if it looks like it might be legitimate. I know a way to load the link into Microsoft PowerShell so that the code can be viewed safely. I did that and found that it would redirect me to dirtbikesblog.com, where a scammer has installed malicious code. So once again I've gone beyond just looking and thinking, but do not click unknown links continues to apply regardless.
5. Obvious by its absence is information about why the recipient might be receiving an "over $400 value" gift card from an unknown sender at a ridiculous email address. Sometimes it's a good idea to compare something that happens online with something that might happen in real life: Let's say that you're walking along a street and someone you don't know approaches you. "Hurry!" he says, "I have a gift card worth more than $400 and you could have it, but you must hurry!" What would your response be? These kinds of scams are usually done in person using what's called a "gangster bankroll" that has a few $100 bills on top and a lot of $1 bills at the bottom. The scammer flashes what looks like thousands of dollars in cash and seems to offer a way for you to get some of it. You're probably suspicious enough to just walk away, just as you should walk away from email scams. By the way, if you want to know how a gangster bankroll is assembled, see this WikiHow article.
6. There is an unsubscribe button at the bottom of the message. Should you click it? Go back to the prime directive: Do not click unknown links. Clicking an unsubscribe link just confirms that you're home and that you will read emails. A crook will not remove you from their list if you ask them to, even if you ask them really nicely.

So it's possible to avoid most scams, cons, social engineering ploys, and other tactics designed to separate you from your money by just employing a bit of cautious suspicion and thinking critically before acting.

You Probably Have A Scanner In Your Pocket

Making copies of documents is a lot easier than it used to be. Many people have printers at home that have scanner functions and also work as a copier and even as a fax machine. Remember fax? Whether you have a multi-function printer or not, there's another option.

A lot of banks make it possible to deposit checks without going to the bank or even a nearby ATM. Just put the check on your desk, use the phone to snap pictures of the front and back, and press a button. My bank immediately acknowledges receipt of the check and the, about an hour later, tells me whether the transaction was successful or not and when the money will be available.

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So you do have a portable scanner if you have nearly any smart phone. If you need to create a permanent copy of a receipt, make a copy of a medical form for submission to an insurance company, or record the contents of a white board from a meeting, your phone can do the job.

Maybe you haven't attended a business meeting where a whiteboard was involved for a while, but business meetings and whiteboards probably will return.

Microsoft's application is called Lens, and it's available in versions for Android and IOS phones, and even Windows phones if you still have one. It does a lot more than just capture a picture of a business card, document, or whiteboard. It can also perform optical character recognition, sometimes even with handwritten text — if it's very clearly written.

Admittedly, even I sometimes have trouble deciphering my handwriting, but Lens didn't perform well even when I wrote clearly. It wasn't surprising to see (A) poor results from my normal handwriting, but the poor results from (B) a clearly written sentence surprised me. Lens can perform OCR on handwriting only in English, and even that seems not to work very well. But Microsoft says that Lens can perform OCR in 30 languages for printed documents and if English is any indicator, (C) it works quite well.

There are also options for Lens to recognize data in tables and to capture it in tabular form.

When capturing a business card, the OCR function can recognize first and last names, phone numbers, email addresses, and other common bits of data, then save the information to your phone's Contacts app.

See more about Microsoft Lens for Android or Microsoft Lens for IOS. The app can be downloaded from the Apple Store or the Google Play Store.

Spare Parts

Adobe Creative Cloud Integrates With Google Workspace

Adobe Creative Cloud users who also use Google Docs or Google Slides in Google Workspace will find that the systems now connect with each other.

Google Workspace includes Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and other Google services. It launched late in 2020. Workspace isn't a free option, but it's not expensive — from $6 per month for basic services to $18 per month for the Business Plus plan that includes 5TB of online storage for each user.

A Creative Cloud Add-on for Google Workspace links Creative Cloud Libraries to Google Docs and Slides so that users can use elements like brand colors, character styles, and graphics inside the Google Docs and Slides so that teams can share ideas, get feedback, and collaborate on work. The add-on is available from Google.

Access to Libraries in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and XD can be used in collaborating with co-workers. For users of Gmail, Docs, and Slides, the new add-on simplifies collaboration. Adobe has a one-minute video that shows how it works.

When The PR People Forget To Check With The Technicians . . .

. . . embarrassing mistakes can happen. For example, an email from the Mozilla Foundation with a subject line What is an IP address?

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The message promised to explain how "IP addresses work and how to protect yours." In fairness to Mozilla, the article is quite informative and it well worth reading if you'd like to learn the basics of what IP addresses are and how they work. The illustrations in the article are accurate, but the illustration in the email is laughable.

IP addresses are available in two versions (version 4 and version 6). The version 6 addresses are much more complex are are not yet as widely used as IPv4 addresses. The illustration is intended to represent an IPv4 address, but the address shown is impossible.

IPv4 addresses consist of four octets, each ranging in value from 0 to 255, that is from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. The illustration displays one segment that is far too large: 5309. Even assuming the graphic artist who created the illustration simply neglected to place one of the decimal points, the address would still be impossible: 172.86.795.309 has two octets that are valid (172 and 86), but also two that are not (795 and 309). Or if the third octet was intended to be 79, then the remaining segment (5309) is invalid. Some addresses such as 0.0.0.0 and 127.0.0.1 are reserved for special uses.

So check out the article because it really does include some useful information, and just ignore the email.

Twenty Years Ago: When "Free" Isn't

Both Gateway and Juno had just settled with the Federal Trade Commission over use of the word "free". Gateway has offered "an unbelievable computer that actually comes with a year of Internet access." Way down at the bottom of the page (in tiny type) was the rest of the story: Use more than 150 hours per month and you'll pay $1.50 per hour for that "free" service. The company also offered toll-free numbers for uses who didn't have local dial-ups, but neglected to mention the $3.95 per hour fee. Juno had offered a 150-hour free trial, but those hours had to be used in a single month that started when the order was placed even thought it took Juno up to 3 weeks to get the software to users. Those who wanted to cancel couldn't do it on-line. Instead, they had to call a long distance number that Juno neglected to publish. Gateway is currently owned by Acer. Juno currently offers a $30/month dial-up service.