Halleynet Headspace

The concept of the chain letter has moved I notice these days from annoying emails that insist you pass them on or suffer your head falling off, your family dying horribly or spending the rest of your life in a gutter, to spam posts on Facebook that the gullible blindly repost. Two minutes to check a story is all it takes and you don’t need a degree in computer science to do this!

Subjects are legion and quite what the motivation is to launch these things I am not always sure but God do they do the rounds and people blindly repost. “DON’T CHANGE THIS SETTING IN FACEBOOK IT WILL STEAL ALL YOUR INFORMATION AND INFECT YOUR PC!”, “John suffered horrific injuries in a bike accident, in this his hour of need pray for him and repost on your facebook status”. And you know people blindly do, accepting the word because a “friend” told them. And so they propogate the garbage….

The one about the bike accident, and the wording here is not correct but the idea is, had been going round for 6 years in various ways ( not solely in facebook as far as I can tell). Its so old there is no one who can tell you if it ever started as a genuine post or was ever simply contrived. But in short the rule is- unless you 100% know for yourself that something is genuine and factual, you would do better to simply delete the request to repost as a waste of bandwidth.

In truth its too late there are too many of the gullible out there and these things have gained traction.

How to spot this stuff:

• Always mistrust anything thats asks to be reposted!
• Anything that says you will catch a virus from changing a setting on a Social Networking site- why worry- you have Anti Virus right?
• you won’t catch a virus- more like someone wants you to retain some setting thats actually benefitting them by way of seeing what your up to on fB than locking it down
• If you are worried, set all your settings in fB to the most Private and then undo the ones you decide are safe.
• If you are worried about your posts being seen on the wider web, DO NOT POST THEM ON FACEBOOK!!!!! There are no secrets on the web.
• When you get a repost request, take some of the key text- no more than 10 words, but something key to the post and paste it into Google. You will be surprised how much has been written on many of these posts.
• Subscribe to the HOAX-SLAYER list on Facebook. This guy really knows his stuff, I beleive he is a fB employee and posts on all the crap going round.
• This list is not definitive.
• and remember just because you got it from a friend does not mean its true!

Be safe.

Unsolicited calls are being received by some web users from a company that call themselves techaviators, they have a number of websites with both .co.uk and .com tlds which you can look up yourself if you are interested.

The calls are made on the premise that your pc is generating some sort of error which has been picked up on the internet either by the IP carriers generally or your isp. They point you to your pc event log and point out these “errors”. if you have a pc and look in your event log you will always see errors in there and while not ideal , in general they are in no way indicative of serious problems or internet detectable issues.

They then get you to download remote access software and login to do their mischief on your pc. At best they point you to a number of bogus issues on your PC which they then charge you some sort of mtce contract to resolve/maintain. I have heard though that they can  install some sort of malware with which they can effectively format your disk if you don’t pay up or co operate. This allegation is unverified by me.

The phone numbers they present are bogus ( the calls originate in Asia- most likely India) Also you will find they present themselves with very European names like “Claire Smith”, “Roger Jones” but have a very distinct Indian accent- the names are obviously bogus.

If they call- tell them you don’t have a pc or better still hang up.

On no account allow them to access your PC, install software or give them Credit Card details. If you have given over access or details I strongly urge you to change passwords on all sites you use (especially those with financial liabilities- online banking, PayPal, stockbrokers, gambling, or e- retailers that retain payment info like Amazon or Google). When changing passwords use something unique on each site and at least 8 characters including one non alpha numeric wherever possible like a “@” or ! character.

If you need more advice on setting secure passwords, get in touch.

Our client rhuallanraptors.com have set up a very simple but effective webshop- using PayPal for payments and WordPress as the basis to sell their range of Falconry related merchandise. Game Clothing: Gloves and vests,  bird perches and cages, raptor food and other ancilliary falconry items can all be found at the new site, falconryshopscotland.com.

They sell a lot of other field and game sports equipment too!

First off I want to say- I love the Adobe Web packages I have used for many years (since it was Macromedia in fact). I currently run the CS4 Web Premium suite for my design tasks.  Generally speaking I don’t take every upgrade version, its simply too much money every year, so I take alternative releases. However I reckon there are probably enough reasons to go to CS5 rather than wait for 6, primarily the support of WordPress in DW CS5.

But it never fails to really, really, really, annoy me how ripped off we are here in the UK.

I know there are countless posts on this around the web especially among UK based designer/developers but we just get totally, totally ripped off on price.

The CS5 upgrade package is priced on the US Adobe website at $599.

It does not take a genius to work out that at current exchange rates this equates to £377.

Now add on 17.5%  ( I am assuming the US price includes no Sales tax) , so this works out at a retail price approx £443 at current  VAT (Nov2010).

SO why is it costing £559.30? Thats a full £116 more than in the US. I hear the pathetic excuses that they need to regionalise a release, regionalise what- the manual you don’t get? The help file – Ok so I can expect colour to be spelled properly not “color”, I fekkin gbet I can’t! All the help is web based (another thing that grates- what if you are not on the web – say on a laptop in a hotel or on a train and need the help info?). I have never found their support to be great- pretty well all web based, hard to get a real person and instant support. Things like Spry are supported by the “Spry Community” ie. lets get our users to support themselves!

Add to this the US currently has a 10% discount offer running right now- what do we get offered- “free shipping”. Well FFS, I can get free shipping ANY DAY OF THE WEEK from places like Amazon so why does a company like Adobe (a huge firm not a lot smaller than Microsoft and Apple) even charge us shipping, never mind feel the need to offer it free as a special offer.

Add further to this, that they could deliver the software over the web, but charge you £14 more for the privilege? Eh? what the fek is that about!? E delivery should be cheaper- it is in nearly every case I have ever encountered!

So are they gonna get my money? Not right now, cutting off my nose to spite my face- maybe in the face of the impending VAT rise , but I need to look into how I can get delivery to the US then ship it in myself, I am not desperate. I know their are delivery address websites that will handle this type of transaction but they are not that cheap for a transaction like this.

I will keep my eye on the main e retailers and maybe grab a mis priced bargain or something, I watch and wait. SORT THIS ADOBE!