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22 Oct 2021 - Podcast #766 - (17:36)
It's Like NPR on the Web
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If you find the information TechByter Worldwide provides useful or interesting, please consider a contribution.
Odds are that you have a Facebook account, but you may be annoyed by the service. Facebook went off-line for five hours on 4 October, and when it came back, a lot of people wrote posts lamenting that it had returned. Maybe learning how to use it smarter would be good.
According to Statista, Facebook has about 302 million users in the United States. The population of the United States is about 331 million, so this suggests that 9 in 10 of us use Facebook, or at least have an account. That seems unlikely, so maybe it would be better to just leave it at this: A majority of US residents have a Facebook account.
So if you hate using Facebook, you do have options: Leave, make useless complaints, work to make it better, or learn how to make it less annoying. Let's consider that fourth option.
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Use SocialFixer or FluffBuster.
Those who use Facebook on a computer can reduce their frustrations by installing one of two browser extensions that give users customization options that Facebook should have built in. My preference is SocialFixer, but FluffBuster is also a good application. You'll find these in your browser's extension store. Both are free. Both developers request donations.
Unfortunately, neither of these browser extensions is available for Android or IOS devices because Facebook's legal team has thus far managed to intimidate developers.
Make your account less attractive to scammers.
How many Facebook friends have told you "My account has been hacked"? It probably hasn't been hacked, but the person's friends list was probably public. A scammer grabbed a photo or two from the victim's account, created a clone account, and then sent friend requests to all of the user's friends. The scammer will try to con those who accept the phony friend requests with requests for financial help.
Example: "I'm in Chicago and my car was stolen. My wallet and phone were in the car, so I need $600 to get home. I'll pay you back when I return. Can you help?" The victim will be asked to send the money via Western Union or a similar service. And they'll never get the money back.
To avoid having your account cloned, hide your friends. Open your account information page, select Settings, open the Privacy tab, and go to the section labeled "How people find and contact you." Choose "only me" for who can see your friends list. There are other options on this section that should be reviewed.
Add security to avoid having your account hacked.
Although most people who claim their account has been "hacked" are wrong because it has only been cloned, accounts can be hacked. Check the Security and Login tab in settings to see where you're logged in. The list can be quite long, so look through it to find devices or locations you don't recognize. If you find one that's not you, log the device out and then change your password.
While you're in the security section, turn on two-factor authentication. You'll need an authenticator app such as the Google Authenticator or Authy. Once you've set this up, scammers will be blocked from logging in to your account even if they have your user name and password.
Then set up the option to receive alerts when your account is used to log on from a device or browser that you don't normally use. If you've set up two-factor authentication, this is less important but still a good idea. To recover your account if you get locked out of it, add the names of three to five Facebook users who can vouch for your identity.
Stop seeing annoying posts from friends.
When you have a friend who makes annoying posts that you don't want to see, but you still want to retain the person as a Facebook friend, you have three options. Find any post by the person and click the ellipses dots in the upper right corner of the post.
Choose "unfollow" if you want to stop seeing all of the person's posts but continue to be a Facebook friend. No future posts from that person will appear on your timeline.Note: I have not performed any of these actions for Rick. His posts are too good to miss.
Turn off autoplay videos.
Maybe you detest videos that start playing the instant they scroll into sight. Turn them off. Scroll down to the Videos tab in settings.
In this section, you can also specify the default video quality, the default volume, whether captions are displayed or not, and (if so) what the captions look like.
Stop typing "following"!
You've probably seen this: Somebody posts an interesting message in a group you follow. Then 37 people post comments with nothing more than the word "Following". They do this so that they will receive notifications when someone posts a comment.
This isn't necessary and all it does is add needless clutter.
Instead, click the ellipses dots in the upper right corner of the post and select "Turn on notifications for this post." No muss. No fuss. No clutter.
While you're there, also consider the "Save link" choice. If the information is something that you'd like to have access to permanently, click this link.
Block notifications from certain groups.
If you're annoyed by an overabundance of notifications about posts, you can tone them down or turn them off. Go to Settings and open the Notifications tab. I have turned off email and SMS notifications.
You can disable notifications for any group or choose options to display notifications every time anyone posts anything to the group, when friends post or when suggested posts are present, or only when friends post.
Just for fun, add some fancy text.
Facebook doesn't have an option to add bold or italic text, to change the typeface, or change the type color. Cool Fancy Text Generator, Fancy Fonts, and Yay Text all make it possible to change text style and weight. To a limited extent, color can be added.
Don't overuse these.
Facebook isn't perfect. If you do find perfection anywhere on the internet, anywhere on the planet, or anywhere in the universe, do be sure to let me know where. In the meantime use Facebook for the features that you like, or don't.
Sometimes a disk drive on a computer will doze off. Although Windows has settings that should keep this from happening, the settings don't always work. Fortunately, there's a little utility called KeepAliveHD that works flawlessly.
Any computer with a single disk drive won't allow the drive to sleep because the operating system and various applications create sufficient disk activity that the device's built-in logic knows better than to sleep. But if your computer has multiple disk drives, some of which see only infrequent activity, one of those less-used drives may sleep and that can cause problems when an application needs to access it. The drive should simply wake up and respond to whatever application requested data or tried to write data to the drive. Sometimes that doesn't work well, either.
A USB3 disk enclosure containing four drives that's adjacent to my computer had this problem. The four physical devices represent a total of six logical drives. It was frustrating to receive an error message several times a day indicating that some application couldn't communicate with a drive. A setting in the advanced power plan section of Settings called Turn off hard disk after is set to 20 minutes by default. On a computer with multiple hard drives, this is far too little time. The correct setting is zero (0), which means "never" in computer speak. Even with the correct setting, one or more of the disk drives occasionally went to sleep.
I installed a utility called KeepAliveHD that writes a small text file to one or more of the external drives every few minutes to prevent the device from entering automatic standby mode. The free utility is available on GitHub. The latest version is 1.6.2-beta from 2017. The program is so simple that there's nothing to update, so there haven't been any updates for four years.
The files written to the disk are tiny, and each new file overwrites the old one so the disk won't be cluttered with hundreds of needless files. Each time the application writes information to the disk, it includes a timestamp. If you open the file, you'll find text like this:
This file was generated by KeepAliveHD application on 10/6/2021 3:24:38 PM
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Setup is quick and easy. There's nothing to install. Just download the file and put it on the computer. The location is unimportant, and I keep the file in my downloads directory, G:\Downloads\KeepAliveHD\. Run the file and check each of the tabs:
KeepAliveHD will keep your disk drive wide awake, alert, and ready for action.
Advertisers know that a couple of dozen words are highly effective in ads. That's why so many ads read as if they were written by a single person. Scam emails have similar characteristics, too, because crooks have learned that some words generate responses.
Marketing legend David Ogilvy published a list of 20 key words for advertising headlines in the 1960s. Many are still useful, but some have been replaced over the past 50 years. Still, these are words that advertising copywriters lean on: amazing, announcing, at last, bargain, challenge, compare, easy, exclusive, finally, how to, hurry, improvement, introducing, magic, miracle, most, new, now, offer, quick, remarkable, revolutionary, sensational, startling, suddenly, this, wanted, and why.
The main thing that scammers want to do is create a sense of urgency. The more urgent their message, the less time you have to think about it. They want you to do something and, like any good advertising copywriter, scammers will tell you exactly what they want you to do.
Words like new, invoice, and receipt are common. A new message, or an invoice or receipt for something you didn't buy. A message from PayPal may claim to be a receipt for a $1200 computer. One that claims to be from DHL may explain that your package couldn't be delivered. An email that looks like something from a bank may say that your account has unauthorized activity. You'll be told that some activity is required immediately.
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Some common scam subjects include RE: invoice, missing invoice, message from (possibly a name you know), you have a new message, telephone message, verification required, action required, expiration notice, password expired, you have a Google Drive file shared, (name of someone you know) sent you some files, and attention required.
Consider these tells: The subject is "NEW MAIL" and the claim is that my email address has been "marked for sending out spam mails". I'm told that I must "verify your email and password to complete the verification now." This is all fine, of course because "this service is free of charge." The message has a copyright date of 2021 and the copyright holder is "techbyter.com". Obviously it's a social engineering ploy to obtain my email address and password. But look a bit further: The sender claims to be "techbyter.com" but the displayed address is "info@pharmaco.fun". Riiiiiiight!
The main point is that whether you see scammers favorite words or not, it's a good idea not to trust any email, instant message, or voice mail implicitly. Any message that tries to convince you that something must be done immediately should garner even more skepticism.
Stop. Think for a moment. Practice NOT clicking links. Proceed with caution.
Some scammers are so stupid that they should never succeed. Sadly, some internet users are even more stupid, so the stupid scammers do succeed.
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The message is from Romania. I validated this by checking the IP address.Dear crook:
COULD YOU MAKE YOUR SCAM A LITTLE MORE OBVIOUS? SOME PEOPLE MIGHT MISS IT OTHERWISE.
Maybe I'm a bit too callous about things like this, but if you respond to such a message, any problems you encounter as a result are entirely your fault.
Automation is a worrying topic. Will your job be taken over by a computer? If so, what's next?
Companies are increasingly using automation technologies to improve business processes change organizations. The process worries employees and many companies struggle to overcome the challenges. One primary problem is finding a way to convince workers to support automation. A survey by Bain & Company shows that 86% of employees want to use automation, but only 30% of business leaders have given them access to it. Similarly, only 5% of employees were permitted to create their own automations at work, and 66% of employees have never even heard of robotic process automation (RPA).
Bain's report, Overcoming the Automation Paradox, says there are four steps companies can take to overcome automation hurdles:
It would be worthwhile to see how the questions about wanting to use automation were phrased. Given workers' suspicions about automation and their concerns, a finding of 80% of employees wanting to use automation seems questionable.
In 2001, USB was still fairly new and pundits liked to call the technology "plug and pray" instead of the industry's "plug and play", but I was excited about the new and faster USB 2 specifications.
I wrote "USB 2.0 is 40 times faster than the older USB 1.1 specification — theoretically 480 Mbps. Yes, that's faster than Firewire. In practice, the actual throughput tends to be about 2/3rds of what Firewire offers."
The new technology was backwards compatible: Don't worry about plugging an older USB 1.1 device into a USB 2.0 card. The cards are backward compatible. And if you run out of ports or if you want the ports to be somewhere other than on the back of your computer, there are hubs for PCs and Macs.
Now we have USB 3.0 with the SuperSpeed USB designation that can transfer data at up to 5 Gbps, which is about 10 times faster than the maximum speed ever reached by USB 2. And the devices are still backwards compatible to USB 1.1.