Safe Social Networking

Scams, traps, cons and swindles abound on the Internet. Here’s some tips to keep you socially safe online.

Social networking has come of age. If you’re not socially networking life may be passing you by –maybe! The fact is, millions are and sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live Spaces are services people can use to connect with others to share information like photos, videos, and personal messages.

With the rising incidence in popularity of these social sites, so do the risks of using them. Identity thieves, crims, hackers, spammers, virus writers along with other weird practitioners of arcane cyber wizardry follow the traffic on these sites with the intention of catching the unwary.

Avoid being fleeced, ripped-off and otherwise taken advantage of –read these tips.

1. Unsafe Clicking: Count ten before you click links that you receive in messages from your friends on your social Web site. Treat links in messages on these sites exactly the same as you would links in e-mail messages.
2. Practice Healthy Suspicion: Never trust that a message is really from who it says it's from. Hackers can and do break into accounts and send messages that look like they're from your friends, but aren't. A suspicious message is best treated as fraudulent and the use of an alternate method employed to contact your friend and check they did in fact, contact you. This most definitely includes invitations to join new social networks.  (I.e. SN sites new to the web. 
3. Protect your friends: Never allow social networking services to scan your e-mail address book. When you join a new social network, you typically receive offers to enter your e-mail address and password to find out whom else is on the network. They will likely offer to use this information to send e-mail messages to everyone in your contact list or even everyone you've ever sent an e-mail message to with that e-mail address. Many responsible social networking sites explain that they're going to do this, but some do not.
4. Lazy Clicking: Here’s a tip you should be already aware of. Type the address of your social networking site directly into the ‘Open’ command of I.E. or the address bar if you use Firefox, or use your personal bookmarks that you know you can trust. If you click a link to your site through e-mail or another Web site, you might be entering your account name and password into a fake site where your personal information could be stolen. Further, links in emails and on web pages can hide the real link and be masquerading as the legitimate link.  This is similar to what we call ‘phishing’ and I’m sure you’ve read the stories bout the ever growing incidence of phishing emails arriving in mail boxes.
5. Choose Your Friends Carefully: Be selective about who you accept as a friend on a social network. Identity thieves do create fake profiles in order to get information from you. This is known as social engineering and is more prevalent than many realise.
6. Haunt the House: Choose your social network carefully. Evaluate the site that you plan to use and make sure you understand the privacy policy. Find out if the site monitors content that people post. Read the information that is immediately available and do a Google search of the site. You never know what you might discover about it. Don’t immediately believe negative reports, but, the old adage, ‘no smoke without fire’ is worth remembering. After all, you will be providing personal information to this site, so, here’s a thought: use the same criteria that you would to select a site where you enter your credit card details!
7. Your Footprint On the Web Is Long Lasting: Did you know that what you write on a social networking site is long lasting and almost permanent? Even if you can delete your account, anyone on the Internet can easily print the information or save it to a computer.
8. Think Before You Act/Download: Installing extras on your site is chancy. Frequently social networking sites invite or make available software and third party apps for you to download that allow you to do more with your personal page. Cyber criminals may use some of these applications to steal your personal information –and more. Again, Google the app you’re interested in first and find out what others are saying about it. An excellent site for information on software in general is www.cnet.com. Check out their reviews and read the views of others besides the publishers themselves and/or the editors. Get a balanced picture and then make up your mind whether you want to add that app to your list of installed programmes on your computer.
9. Mixing Work & Socialising on the Net: Some employs accept/allow responsible extra curricula activity while you’re on their clock. Others don’t –for obvious reasons. If you value your weekly pay-check think about whether this is what you should do or not.
10. Parents: Kids Social Network a lot. Your children probably know far more about it than you! Talk to them about social networking. Be wise, maybe you can find out what they know and whether they are being safe online by asking for help and advice yourself! They may be keen to demonstrate their sites and show off their knowledge. Then you can adroitly (there’s a good word) suggest safety tips. Don’t, whatever you do, show shock or anger. All you will do is wreck any chance you have of monitoring their activities and fostering safe socialising on the net. That would not be smart.

There you have it.  Have fun, make friends, enjoy the web –and be safe while your at it.  John

Summer Freeze

Here in Kiwiland we are enjoying warm beautiful, even hot, weather.  Summer is here and great to be alive –until your PC freezes, that is. 

Yep, that’s right.  The dreaded freeze.  You know what I mean.  That machine in front of you just stops working and refuses to respond.  No matter what you do –or say(!) – nothing will make it do what it’s supposed to do.  Not for you anyway. 

Well, good news and bad news.  It happens to all of us.  Even PhDs in computer science face the dreaded catharsis of PC Freeze from time to time.  So, don’t feel so bad.  You’ve come to the right place  The bad news: well, sometimes it can be quite serious, but, more good news, most of the time it’s easily fixed. 

Here we go…

Just a wee commercial right here though –If you live in Hamilton, New Zealand, if this doesn’t solve your troubles right away, give me, Hamilton Office & Home PC Care, a bell on +64274412623 and you can drop it off and we are sure to be able to get it going for you. :-) 

Please note that these words of wisdom (I hope) are primarily for XP users.  Vista will be able to do similar things but you will have different paths and terms for the same tasks.  Sorry about that. 

Back up now! The golden, and I do mean golden, rule of PC Care is BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK,  BEFORE the freeze and before any sort of trouble strikes.   Scroll through these blog articles for more on PC Maintenance to help you with this.

Access Task Manager: Press the Control (Ctrl) + Alt + Delete keys now, commonly called the ‘three-fingered salute’.  This will open the Task Manager and then look under the ‘Applications’ tab, usually the one that opens first by default, and look to see if any running apps have stopped responding.   You will be able to see if this is so because the offending app will say, ‘Not responding’ right beside it.  If so, click on and select then click the ‘End task’  button at the bottom of the Task Manager window. Chances are, this will fix the problem immediately by closing the faulty app and you will find you’ve regained control of your PC. 

Re-launch the Application: Re-launch  the app that failed responding and start back over.  Hopefully, you won’t have lost too much data in the process.  Of course, you can avoid losing too much work by saving your work as you go along.  Every sentence or so you should develop the habit of pressing ‘Alt+F+S’ in Windows which is the speed key to save your work without lifting your hands off the keyboard.  I’m doing it all the time as I type now.  In fact, I just accidentally closed my Windows Live Writer window and, if I hadn’t been saving as I go along, I would have lost it all! 

Further Checks:

Caps Lock & Number Lock: You might have accidentally presseed the Caps Lock or NumLk keys on your keyboard.  If you have take a look and see if the indicator lights for those keys have changed.  Usually they are located at the top RHS of your key board, but they many be elsewhere.   You can check that they are working OK by pressing the ‘Function (fn) button + Caps Lk’ and see if the Number Lock button lights up.  Then do the same with the ‘CapsLk + Num Lk’ buttons and check that as well.  It may be just a matter of having accidentally switched on or off these controls.

Led Lights: Look and see if your Hard Drive activity light is flashing?  If it is, windows is working hard for you performing some necessary task and you need to pause and let it get on with it.  As soon as it has done whatever pressing job it must do, it will yield control back to you.  So, be a little merciful and allow your (sometimes) faithful machine to do it’s work.  Go and make a cup of coffee!  You wouldn’t believe the amount of work your machine has to do to serve your every wish! ;-)  It may be the hard disk is working too hard and you should be merciful and add more RAM. 

Just another wee commercial right here though –If you live in Hamilton, New Zealand, give me, Hamilton Office & Home PC Care, a bell on +64274412623 and you can drop it off and we will add more RAM for you in flash –or maybe two flashes! :-) 

Mouse Worries: Mice do need a bit of care and attention now and again.  They actually benefit from a careful cleaning once-in-a-while.  To do this examine your mouse carefully and see if you can open it up and then use some compressed air and/or a soft bristled brush and clean the parts that provide the contacts in the vicinity of the ball.  If unsure, you can check with us or simply buy a new one.  PS2 mice are very cheap to replace these days.  If it’s wireless mouse the batteries may be simply flat –they don’t last forever you know! 

Chick All Your Peripheral Devices:  You may need to unplug them all one by one systematically and check to see if one of them is malfunctioning and causing a conflict or other problem.  Sometimes your machine may be performing a security scan of your devices (USB storage devices etc) and you may need to allow it to finish.  Or, it may have stalled in the process and run into a glitch of some sort.  Remember to stop all USB devised properly using the facility provided by Windows.  If you are unsure about this consult your hardware/PC manuals.  I’ll do a Blog on USB devises shortly to help with this.  Unplug all unnecessary USB devices such as printers, scanners, iPods and USB drives.   None of these wonderful and immensely useful gadgets do not last for ever, sadly.  So, one of them may have simply stopped and you will need to replace it.

If none of  the above steps helps and/or solves the problem, you may well have a major on your hands.  This could range from overheating issues, other major hardware failure, serious software failure, driver conflicts and more.

Hardware Failure: Hardware failure can be anything from an improperly seated or bad memory module to a failed hard drive or system board. The very first thing to do is to run a hardware diagnostic test. To do this it may be best to ask a PC tech to help such as Hamilton Office & Home PC Care on +64274412623 if you live in Hamilton, New Zealand.

I hope the freeze is of short duration and the long happy days of summer return.  John