Facebook Scam: Chuck Norris dies at age of 71! Not a Joke.

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Firstly, the man who brought us Walker Texas Ranger, Chuck Norris is alive. A link to a video that claiming to shed light on the supposed death of the action movie and series star at 71 years old has hit Facebook users hard with an epidemic-like survey scam.

 ”Chuck Norris isn’t dead, and the messages point to an all-too-familiar survey scam.” commented Senior technology consultant at Sophos, Graham Culley. (Sophos is an international developer and vendor of security software and hardware including anti-spyware, anti-virus & anti-spam)

The text of the wall post is as follows:
[video] Chuck Norris dies at age 71! Not a Joke. – www.worldnews77551.com – See the video to find out how he died. News today of Chuck Norris death at age 71 has been met with confusion and humour, but sadly it is true.

Here’s how the wall-post looks like:

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Facebook now forces their timeline on everyone

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Whether you like it or not, very soon Facebook Timeline will be mandatory for all.

“Over the next few weeks, everyone will get timeline. When you get timeline, you’ll have 7 days to preview what’s there now. This gives you a chance to add or hide whatever you want before anyone else sees it.”

The above statement was given by Facebook Engineer Paul McDonald on January 24, 2012 in an update on facebook.com’s home blog.

Facebook announced that all profiles will be moved over into the new Timeline mode over the next few weeks. Since the birth of the Timeline in September 2011, users have had the chance to choose whether or not they would opt into Timeline, but now in a few weeks – the ‘older’ profile style will no longer be available.

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Be informed, Be protected – 6 Critical Features for Facebook Security

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Ignorance is the real enemy of many that complain about security on online social networks. Knowledge is key to knowing and understanding how facebook security features can protect you and the steps you can take to make sure that you have these features turned ON..

1. HTTPS browsing at all times

On most sites displaying or requiring valuable information (e.g. the payment page for online shopping) you might have noticed have noticed that the url of the webpage address starts with an “https://”

The additional “s” assures you that a secure code is being used for communication and no one can get hold of your valuable information.It is now possible to activate this HTTPS browsing for your facebook to run on secure codes at all times.

  1. Click the Account menu in the top right corner and select Account Settings.
  2. Next to the Account Security heading click the Change link.
  3. Check the “Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible” checkbox under the Secure Browsing (https) heading.
  4. Click the Save button.

The only potentially annoying thing is that once this setting is turned on, you have to be prepared for it to be turned off in certain situations. For instance the secure setting is not available in Facebook apps. Every time you enter one of the non secure areas you’ll be prompted that you are leaving the secure connection and you will have to respond ti this prompt each time.
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Apple Profits Soar as iPhone and iPad Sales Skyrocket

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On Tuesday Apple held it’s hotly anticipated quarterly earnings conference, at which CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed some quite stellar earnings and sales for figures for the current quarter, which was by far the best in the company’s history. To say the results were great is an understatement: they blew all estimates out of the water – and then some. Considering the consistently strong performance quarter-on-quarter, Apple’s stock looks grossly undervalued.

“We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads, and Macs,”

- Tim Cook, Apple CEO.

iPhone 4S and iPad 2 Propel Sales Through the Roof

Apple sold some 37 million iPhones (a solid 128% growth since the same quarter last year), 15 million iPads (a 111% increase) and 5.2 million Macs (a more modest 26% increase). These facts have helped propel Apple skywards to generate more than $13.1 billion in quarterly profits (which is almost same as the Q4 2010 revenue). Not only that, but Apple has managed to sustain a more than healthy profit margin of nearly 45%.

This quarter’s sales were boosted by a later-than-expected iPhone 4S release and astounding Christmas sales, which helped lift the results and made up for the slightly disappointing previous quarter – which suffered as buyers held off upgrading until the 4S release. It also seems that Amazon’s loss-leading Kindle Fire didn’t really much of an impact on iPad sales, as many had feared. Continue reading →

Facebook Scam: wooow now I have seen how many hours I spend on Facebook

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Another Facebook Survey Scam is trending at the moment, more than 300,000 people has been lured into installing the rogue Facebook application and completed the surveys designed to make the scammers revenue. 300,000 is a very big number, and that goes to show how good a business these scams are for the people that are behind them, let’s say they get $0.10 per completed survey that’s $30,000 is a matter of days from this scam alone, and they have tons of scams running simultaneously.

The wording of this scam is the following:
wooow now I have seen how many hours I spend on Facebook…to find your time click here > > – on.fb.me/zn3Fvm

The wall post looks like this:
facebook-scam-wooow-now-i-have-seen-how-many-hours-i-spend-on-facebook-wall
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Google will now access and use all your personal data and browsing history

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Google has just announced a privacy policy change, it will take effect from March 1st, 2012. This seems to be the end of Google sticking to it’s long-standing promise of “don’t be evil“. The policy change was announced on the Google blog and the policy change basically means that if you are signed into your Google account using any service, Google can use the information on all their other services as well. Here’s how Google phrases it:

Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.

If Google chooses to take full advantage of all the possibilities in this policy change it could have a huge impact on our daily use of the internet. Just try to think about how many services you use every day are owned and run by Google. One of the biggest things could be their steady growing market share on the smartphone OS field, just imagine how many people Google can track via the GPS in their Android phones, so if Google knows that you visit golf courses a lot based on your phone GPS they can spam you with golf ads on all pages you visit that are showing Google AdSense ads (and that’s most pages nowadays). They know which apps you download on your phone, which games you play and so could tailor your search results in Google search to show results based on that also. Because Google has AdSense ads on most pages they can track your every move online, and now that they’ve opened up the door for themselves to use that information, well no one can really know the consequences, but they could be very big. Continue reading →

Facebook Scam: THIS WEEK ONLY! $100 Applebee’s Gift Card Giveaway!

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Another Facebook scam has surfaced recently. Yet another Facebook scam that feeds of people’s desire to click things that appears to have something to do with free giftcards. If you haven’t learnt already, then everything that sounds too good to be true – well it probably is.

This scam is not a survey scam like most other scams we see on Facebook, this one is actually worse in the way that the end-goal for the scammers is to get a browser plugin installed on your computer. This can lead to all sorts of bad things happening, it could be a key-logger that would enable the scammers to access anything that you log into via your browser after the plugin is installed.

The wording of this scam reads as follows:
THIS WEEK ONLY! $100 Applebee’s Gift Card Giveaway! – www.applebees68316.com – Visit out site to get a complimentary $100 gift card and enjoy your favourites at any Applebees in the country. Have a great start to the new year!

The wallpost looks like this:
facebook-scam-this-week-only-100-applebees-gift-card-giveaway-wall

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Google+ now supports nicknames, pseudonyms and names in other scripts

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In an announcement from Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of Product, it was revealed that Google+ now supports the addition of nicknames or maiden names to your Google+ profile. In addition to nicknames you can now also (finally) enter your name in another script (for example: Thai, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Japanese etc.). Both these features have been possible on Facebook for a long time, and it was always only a matter of time until Google+ adapted the idea and implemented it as well, that time has come now and they are launching the first version this week.

To update your nickname/maiden name, simply go to your profile and click Edit Profile, click on your name in big letters at the top, in the box click “More options.” and the nickname box will appear (see below screenshot).

Now your profile name will show as the following screenshot shows:

While this might be good for people who like to have a nickname, this is big news for the billions of people who’s name is in another script than the Roman alphabet.
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3D Designer Glasses From Norwegian Twins

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Two Norwegian twins have started a war against the ugly generic 3D glasses we are given at the cinema when going to watch a 3D movie. From the first time they went to see a 3D movie they knew that there had to be a market for designer 3D glasses that would work for 3D cinemas and televisions also.

I remember my first experience with 3D glasses, I was going to watch Avatar 3D and saw this huge box of glasses next to the cinema entrance. I remember how everyone was taking pictures of each other in the lobby while waiting for the doors to open, I don’t think they took these pictures because the glasses looked good, they did this because the black 3D glasses looked totally goofy. Kine and Einy Paulsen (the founders of Ingri:Dahl) noticed this as well, they just took it further than I would have ever thought of. They are now designing and producing 3D glasses, they already have a collection available on their website, but now they are looking to expand with a new collection and therefore they are using Kickstarter to raise $10,000 to start the production of the new generation Ingri:Dahl 3D glasses.
According to their Kickstarter page the new generation glasses will work in all cinemas world-wide but also on a number of 3D television brands, such as LG, JVC and Vizio.
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Ratepoint Account Permanently Closing Feb. 2

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I just received an email from Ratepoint telling me that their assets and technologies have been acquired and that means that all their accounts will close on Feb 2nd 2012. That means one weeks notice to all their customers to find an alternative before they close down completely.

For those of you that don’t know Ratepoint and what they do, then in short they offer handing of business and product reviews for your website. So for example if you have an online shop and you would like all your customers to rate your services, you can send them a link to Ratepoint and they can write a short review about their shopping experience there. It’s a fairly simple service, but it’s quite important for an online shop to show reviews hosted on a third party website, so the customers know you didn’t just make them all up yourself and added some extra stars to the reviews.

Here is the email that Ratepoint sent out to their customers today: Continue reading →