By Rick Rouse
Rick's Daily Tech Tips.

Note from Carol.   Any links in Messenger should be suspect even when seemingly sent from Facebook OR from a trusted friend.    Also I would include in this messages that your page has been marked for deletion.   I get about three or four of those a week.  Reject message requests: In the Messenger app, go to Privacy & safety, then Message delivery, and reject requests from people you don't know

By now you surely know there are multiple scams making the rounds on social media at any given time.

That's just a sad fact of life in this Internet era.

There's a very dangerous scam that's been popping up on Facebook at times for years, and unfortunately it's making the rounds again right now.

This scam works something like this:
You receive a text message or email stating that your Facebook account has been "reported for abuse".

You're then told that you must provide a ton of personal information and "update your credit card information" in order to prove that your account is legit and you are who you claim to be.
If you receive this message, ignore it. It's a scam, and a very dangerous one at that.

If you fall for the scam and provide the requested info, the scammer will end up with your credit card information and possibly even enough of your personal info to steal your identity and open new credit accounts in your name. At the very least they will be able to sign into your Facebook account and assume control of it.

Luckily, this is a very easy scam to avoid...

All you have to do is make sure you never respond to any private messages or emails asking you to verify your personal information in the manner described.

Again, these types of messages and emails are ALWAYS fake. If you receive one of them you can easily verify that it's a fake simply by signing into your Facebook account at the official Facebook website (Facebook.com) or by signing in via the Facebook app. If there's truly an issue with your account you'll be notified at that time.

Important: DO NOT click any links in the text message or email. Only sign in at the official Facebook website or via the Facebook mobile app.

Note: Facebook does ask certain users to provide proof of identity on occasion, but they only display that request when the user attempts to log in to the system, never in a private message or email.

If Facebook ever does feel the need to require you to verify your identity, they will direct you to visit this page on the official Facebook website for instructions on how to submit your ID/documentation for review.

Bottom line: It's important to always remain vigilant about protecting yourself from Facebook scams, and the scam described above is one of the most dangerous scams being spread at the current time.

By BD Bondy
​Image: Carol Bondy

I frequently hear from someone that they don’t use their computer anymore, but instead, they use their iPad. I understand this completely, as I use my desktop so infrequently, but I use my phone all the time. I’ve gotten quite comfortable using my phone for nearly everything, shopping, reading the news, entertainment.

That said, I still prefer my desktop for writing. I Googled the question of laptop or tablet and found some interesting articles. My experience is that many folks are giving up their computers for tablets. What came up from my search wasn’t quite like that. It makes me wonder if many of the articles are purposely biased towards computer manufacturers.

Let's look at some things. Tablets are smaller, lighter, and extremely easy to carry with you wherever you go. They run a long time on battery, they come with every imaginable app you could want, and as the waiter said to Mr. Creosote, “it is wafer thin”.

An argument can be made that they are less powerful, but my smartphone has as good of a processor as my desktop. Tablets have less storage. While this is probably true, how much storage is your computer actually using? It may have a terrabyte of storage, but you are probably using a tenth of that. Besides, cloud storage solves that issue, along with the convenience of having a very secure place for storage that is backed up by a giant corporation.

Tablets have small screens and no keyboards. This is only true until you send your display to your TV, or other, larger screen, and there are plenty of Bluetooth keyboards and mice that you can use.

There are plenty of reasons to prefer a tablet to a computer. I still prefer to write on my desktop, at a desk, sitting upright in a chair. So I will keep my computer. However, you may feel differently. I am including a couple of links for you to read. On is from a college student that switched to a tablet. The other is from HP. I don’t agree with HP for several of it’s points, but you may.

From HP  
College kid says 

There are some obvious reasons why you may require a desktop, software, and the means to run it. If you are a serious photographer, you can do some amazing things on a tablet, but you need a powerful computer to run some of the major photo, and movie editing programs. Businesses need computers to run their business software. Stuff like that.
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On the other hand, you can use your tablet to remote connect to those computers...

By BD Bondy
 
As I write this on the free version of Microsoft 365, I am aware of the irony of what I’m doing here.

It used to be Office 365, and Microsoft Office, now it’s Microsoft 365. I’ve used the MS product since the 80’s, perhaps you have too? It’s changed quite a bit. It was a standard in the workplace, certainly for most of my career, though Carol used to use Word Perfect.
These days Microsoft Office 365 seems to be the standard for an office suite. There are other choices though, and I was reading about one in particular, MobiOffice, that sounded pretty good.

First though, the alternative that has been around the longest probably, Apache OpenOffice, is still available for download, and it is still FREE. It is a “complete” office suite with what the vast majority of us would want or need. To me it looked like an old version of MS Office, like, years old. But it’s free, and it’s fairly complete. It can save documents in the same format of MS, if you remember to, and it can read them as well.  Click Here for Open Office  

The successor to OpenOffice? I read that and I don’t know what it means exactly, is LibreOffice. I haven’t tried it, but by its description, it looks like it would be similar to OpenOffice. So that seems like a worthy offering. Also FREE, it’s a downloadable version of an office suite.  Click Here for LibreOffice.  
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Google also offers office products in their browser. Like the free version of MS 365, it requires an internet connection. Those 9 dots in the upper right of the Google browser, click on that. You’ll find some great apps there, in particular, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, which is like ‘word’, ‘excel’, and ‘power point’.

So if you don’t want to use Microsoft 365, for whatever reason, you can still manage your office needs, and generally, for free.

Now, back to MobiOffice. I have not used it, and it is not free, but it is relatively cheap. You can read about it HERE. 

While it is a paid program, it sounds like it is rich in features, and has a modern interface, like MS 365, so it may be the perfect alternative. Read about it and see.

By Rick Rouse

By now you probably know better than to click or tap on links in emails because that's one of the easiest ways to infect your device with a virus.
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After all, once you click a link and visit an infected website, the damage is done.
Well, the same thing is now happening on smartphones as well, only the malware is being spread via text messages.

What happens is you receive a text from a friend telling you about a great new app they just heard about.

In reality, the app is malware, and if you tap on the link in the message the malicious app is installed on your phone.

Once the app has been installed on your phone, it accesses your Contact List and sends the same malicious text message that you received to all of your contacts (in addition to a ton of other nasty tricks). Not a good thing.

Luckily, there are a couple of easy ways to protect yourself from the malicious apps that are being spread in this way:

1 - Follow the same rule with text messages that you follow for emails: Don't tap on any links.
2 - Install a high quality anti-malware security app on your phone. There are several good ones to choose from but I use and recommend Malwarebytes.

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​By Brian Bondy
 
Windows 11 can be pretty annoying with all the notifications. Whether reminding you to finish setting up Windows, or that you have mail, you may not want to be pestered about things. If you want to spare yourself the reminders that you don’t need or want in the first place, then read THIS.

Personally, I found this quite helpful and went through the first 4 right away. I tend to turn off more than is recommended, because I don’t want to hear about any of it. Some of the notifications may be useful, so don’t go crazy, but check it out and see if maybe you can make Win 11 a bit less annoying.

Perhaps you’d like to stop all the ADs coming up on your iPhone. For me, the most annoying ones are the ADs that pop-up when I’m trying to read the news. Sometimes they shift the whole page I’m reading, or they block some of the actual content. It is extremely annoying. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to prevent that safely.

I know there are third party APPs that are supposed to help with AD blocking, but I have trust issues so I haven’t tried them. However, there are some things that your phone will do on its own in the settings. Read about that HERE.