$1.69 worth of bacon at McDonald’s:
$1.52 worth of bacon at Whole Foods:
You get about 8 fairly thick slices from Whole Foods for the same price as 2 anemically thin slices from McDonald’s.
McDonald’s used to charge $.69 for their “side of bacon”. Then it went up to $.99. Then it went up to $1.29. Then it went up to $1.69!! McDonald’s: What are you thinking?!?
Need I say more?!?
I ran across a fake Southwest Airlines Facebook profile today promising to give away all-inclusive vacation packages to 30 entrants:
(note how the profile name has a period after the first word: “Southwest. Airlines” – that’s how they make it look like Southwest’s own profile page as much as possible)
I hate to see my friends taken in by these fake contests. I don’t know the exact angle for these scams – how do they benefit from creating fake contests except to get many Facebook accounts to “Follow” their fake account?!?
Like a good Facebook citizen, I want to report the fake profile to Facebook so they can review it, determine that it’s fake, and then take it down. Hmmm… how do we do that? Oh, I know. Click on the profile’s page, pull down the “…” option menu, and click on “Report Page”:
Once I click on Report Page, I’m given several options, including the obvious: “It’s a scam”
Click on Continue, and I get another list of options:
Two options: “Block Southwest. Airlines” and “Hide all from Southwest. Airlines”. WHAT?!?! Where is “Report to Facebook for review”???
Facebook: Why have you REMOVED the most obvious and most useful option for people to report scams to you??? Instead of letting you review the post or profile directly, you simply want users to stick our heads in the sand and hope the problem goes away. Who gives a shit about our friends and others that might fall victim to this scam, right??
ABSOLUTELY LAME FACEBOOK!!!
I had to laugh when I saw a TV ad for LifeLock. They talk about how they are “Relentlessly Protecting Your Identity”, and then they say “If you sign up now, we’ll give you this free shredder to help you secure your discarded documents”.
Really?!? A strip shredder? You call that SECURE??? I don’t think so! That is the favorite shredder of criminals because it makes you (their potential victim) FEEL safe when you use it, but makes it OH SO EASY for them to reassemble your document(s) should the need arise!
Note how this page states: “Pretty much useless. My kids could put the document back together.”
Come on LifeLock – get serious and don’t offend people by treating them like idiots!
If you receive a friend request from someone who you think you’re already friends with on Facebook, it may be a criminal trying to create a mirror of your friend’s account to get all of that friends contacts onto the new (fake) account.
The easiest thing to do is to contact the original account owner directly and ask him/her if they’re creating a new account (or somehow accidentally un-friended you)? If they did, go ahead and accept the new friend request.
If you can’t get in touch with the original account’s owner, you can click on the name of the account in the friend request and check out the new profile. If it has no posts older than a few days (or a few hours), it is very likely a fake account.
Once you’ve determined you’re looking at a fake Facebook profile, here’s how to report the fake profile to Facebook:
Find the three dots in the box to the right of the “Message” button on the fake profile’s main page. Click on the three dots and the menu will display. Click on “Report”.
Another menu will pop up – click on “Report this profile”:
Then click on “Continue”.
Another menu will pop up asking why you’re reporting this profile. Click on “They’re pretending to be me or someone I know”, then click on “Continue”.
Hmmmm… I feel like a step is missing here? If I missed a screenshot, you can probably figure out the next step. If it asks, obviously tell it you’re reporting a friend’s profile – not your own. Something like that…
At some point, another menu stating “What You Can Do” will pop up. Click on “Submit to Facebook for Review”.
The menu will prompt you for the name of the original account owner’s profile name. Type their profile name into the prompt and click “Submit”.
Now that you’ve reported the fake profile to Facebook, you can just click “Done”.
Good luck! Thanks for helping keep Facebook safe for your friends and family!
I just ran across a web site that is being used to push fake Adobe Flash Player:
Fake Adobe Flash Player update
http://www.stupidityexposed.com/wp-admin/post-new.php
I checked the domain’s registration and saw that it was just registered that day, so I attempted to contact the registrar for the domain:
There is was, big as life: abuse-contact@publicdomainregistry.com
Now WHY would you list an abuse email address if you’re not going to accept abuse complaints sent to that email address?!?!
Someone goes to the trouble of looking up the domain registration, and uses the abuse contact provided to send an email to alert the registrar of a problem, and they can’t accept the email!! Instead, they send you back an email stating that you need to use some web form to file the complaint instead?!?!?
I’m so tired of Internet Service Providers who are so afraid of their own shadows that they won’t use email to perform the normal operations of a responsible ISP!! Most ISPs understand that there’s a reason for standardized email addresses (abuse, hostmaster, postmaster, etc), but some ISPs think they’re above the rules and that it’s better to waste people’s time than to just do their jobs!
I was just on the DONOTCALL.GOV web site today (yes, I got another call from Bridget or Rachael from Cardmember Services), and while poking around, I came across this:
If these aren’t the lamest excuses for why they can’t get things done, I don’t know what are!! There is nothing preventing the government from REQUIRING that phone companies provide ONLY ACCURATE CALLERID INFORMATION! There’s nothing that says people have to be allowed to LIE in their CallerID information! Sure, some people need to be able to BLOCK their CalledID for legal (safety) reasons, but then it’s BLOCKED – the recipient can see that and decide to answer the phone or not. There’s no reason why the data provided via CallerID should be spoofable or set by the “customer”.
Without valid CalledID information on the phone, the DONOTCALL.GOV web site is NOTHING MORE THAN AN EXPENSIVE JOKE that the American citizens are wasting millions of dollars on!!!!
I use Thunderbird as my email client for several accounts, including an employer’s Office 365 account. I organize my emails in folders, and have been doing so for years. My last Thunderbird update was 11 days ago.
Yesterday, when I opened my Thunderbird client, the folder list for the Office 365 account disappeared and only showed “Inbox” and “Trash”. My other IMAP accounts all work fine. I closed and reopened Thunderbird several times hoping it was just a temporary glitch, but to no avail.
I went to Office 365’s web site today. Of course, there’s no way to contact Microsoft about an issue, so I have to go to the Microsoft Office 365 Community and hope that other users might have an answer?
It turns out I’m not the only one seeing this problem. It also turns out that someone from Microsoft is claiming that the Thunderbird client is not supported by Office 365. He also claimed the problem is in the client.
Funny, but the client didn’t change from Wednesday to Thursday. What else could have changed? The IMAP server provided by Microsoft? Probably… yeah, let’s go with that.
Lame response from Microsoft
Lame response if you ask me! Sounds like Microsoft is trying to force customers to use Microsoft software instead!?
I just got an auto-reply from Network Solutions’ abuse department. You know Network Solutions – they were one of the first primary domain registrars, so you’d think they were old pros on the Internet, wouldn’t you? Then why can’t they send an email with images that displays reasonably in any and all current mail programs? Here is how the email message looks in Thunderbird:
I don’t have problems with other people that send messages with images in them, so WTF?!?!
I don’t know what GoDaddy’s “security / abuse” department does, but apparently illegal activities (i.e. phishing sites) are not very high on their priority list!
This has happened several times in the last 2 weeks. I’ve submitted several URLs to them that are hosting a few phishing sites. The sites are hosted on GoDaddy’s servers. Some of the domains were very recently registered with GoDaddy. They take several days before they come back to me and say something like this:
REALLY?!?!?!? “As quickly as possible”???? I don’t think so!
Meanwhile, the phishing sites are still up and the phishing pages (there are at least 8 on just 1 site!) are still collecting information from (new) victims of identity theft!! If the [phishing] content has ALREADY BEEN IDENTIFIED AND REPORTED, why does it take so long to take it down?!?!?
It wasn’t until I called GoDaddy’s “Support” team and threw a hissy fit that the agent asked me to email the URL directly to him (instead of ‘abuse@godaddy.com’). He accepted my email, forwarded it to his boss, and the site was down 2 or 3 hours later.
But, THAT’S NOT HOW IT’S SUPPOSED TO WORK!!!
I sent a few complaints to ‘abuse@godaddy.com’ about web sites they’re hosting that have been hacked and are now hosting phishing sites. Here’s what I get back:
GoDaddy's response to phishing complaints sent to the abuse mailbox
This clearly shows that GoDaddy’s Abuse Department does not want to (and will not) deal with phishing complaints! It means nothing that every other responsible ISP in the world accepts phishing complaints at their ‘abuse@’ mailbox, but for some reason, GoDaddy thinks their method is better.
To top it all off, they INSIST that the complaint be resent to the ‘phishing@godaddy.com’ email address – that THEY WILL NOT forward the message themselves!! This means that the phishing site remains operational while GoDaddy was perfectly capable (but perfectly unwilling) to shut down the phishing site while they’re waiting for you to forward the original complaint to their “Phishing Department” instead!!!
And who knows how many people become victims of these phishing sites while GoDaddy leaves the page up when they could have shut it down hours sooner?!?!