Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Rick’s Daily Tech Tips Update for Tuesday, March 19, 2024
• Be careful if you have ‘Find My’ enabled on your Apple device
• How to avoid falling for hoaxes and scams on Facebook
• How to quickly view the warranty status of your iPhone or iPad
• How to keep an eye on your dog (and toss him a treat) while you’re away from home
• March’s Tech Tips Giveaway: HP Pavilion 17.3″ HD+ Laptop
Facebook consists of a vast community of “friends” who are interconnected to one another in a multitude of ways.
The whole thing can be both overwhelming and amazing.
Throughout a typical Facebook session we can see people we don’t even know pop up out of the digital woodwork to comment on and “Like” things that we or our friends have posted.
Question from Ellen: I’ve been following your blog for a while now, Rick.
It seems like you write about a new Facebook scam or hoax at least once a week or so.
I always forward your ‘scam alerts’ to my sister to make sure she sees them, but the other night she asked me to stop. She said there can’t really be that many scams on Facebook because they keep them cleaned up.
I got to thinking about it and it does seem like there are an awful lot of them. Are you sure they’re all real? [Read more…]
Facebook accounts are preferred targets of hackers and scammers these days, and it’s easy to see why.
With roughly 3 billion users worldwide, the Facebook community at large offers hackers an enormous opportunity for scamming their way to ill-gotten gains and/or the twisted satisfaction that some receive from wreaking havoc on a massive scale.
It isn’t Facebook’s fault, really. After all, they provide all the technical tools we need in order to keep our accounts safe from hacking attacks. [Read more…]
If you use Facebook you’re probably used to receiving cute and funny videos in instant messages (IMs).
And of course there are political videos and a wide variety of other types of videos being shared via IMs as well.
Truth be told, we all get them on a regular basis.
Dozens of videos land in my IM inbox every day, but I never click on any of them. And I strongly recommend that you avoid clicking on them as well.
Many of these seemingly harmless videos are actually quite dangerous because they have viruses attached to them. If you take the bait and attempt to watch one of them, your computer or Android device could become infected. And that could easily ruin your entire day. [Read more…]