From Rick's Daily Tips

If you’ve been using Facebook for more that 5 minutes you’re probably well aware that hackers and scammers love targeting Facebook users with all kinds of fraudulent activities.

I’m sure you’ve seen an occasional “Yikes – I’ve been hacked!” post pop up in your newsfeed. In fact, you probably see them on a regular basis.

The thing is, many of the folks who believe their Facebook account has been “hacked” weren’t really hacked at all. Their accounts have been “cloned” instead.
While the hacking and cloning of Facebook accounts are both extremely irritating for everyone affected by the fallout, they are actually very different things and they require very different responses when one of them happens to you.

First, let’s talk about getting “hacked”… 
When someone “hacks” your account they actually take control of the account itself.
Some hackers break into accounts by guessing or stealing the passwords.

Others gain access by tricking the victim into either giving them the password via a malicious link in a phishing email or installing a malicious app.

Either way, the result is the same: When someone hacks into your Facebook account he/she can do anything with the account that you can do yourself.

For example, the hacker can post on your Timeline to spam your friends with bogus offers and send them links to click for planting malware onto their own PCs.
They can also send out friend requests to people you don’t even know in order to grow your friends list and expand the pool of people they can potentially scam.

In short, having your account hacked results in the hacker “becoming you” on Facebook.

That means when your friends receive spam, nasty IMs and other garbage in their newsfeeds, it will appear that you are the culprit who is sending it out (and in a way it is, because it’s literally your account that’s sending it).

Now, lets talk about getting “cloned”…
Unlike getting hacked, your Facebook account gets “cloned” when a scammer creates a brand new account in your name.

Once the new account is created the scammer will copy the personal info that’s on your real account’s “About” page to the fake account. Next, he will download some of the photos you have posted on the real account and upload them to the fake account.
Once those tasks have been completed the scammer will post a series of status updates similar to the ones you usually post yourself, then “like” a few of the same pages that you have “liked” from your real account.

When all is said and done, the “cloned” account looks a lot like your real one. The scammer can then use the fake account to send friend requests to everyone on your real account’s friends list.

Some of your friends will be skeptical when they receive the bogus friend request and simply ignore it, but inevitably a good portion of your friends will accept it because they believe it to be legit.

Once the fake account has a few dozen of your friends aboard, the scammer will send friend requests to people you don’t even know to fill up the fake account’s friends list (which of course expands the pool of potential scam victims).

The important thing to understand is that when your Facebook account gets cloned, it has not been hacked. The scammer never has actual control of your real account and he cannot use it to do anything other than read your posts and look at your photos.

Now that you understand the difference between having your account “hacked” and having it “cloned”, you need to know what to do to if one of them ever happens to you.
As in sports, the best defense is a good offense when it comes to protecting your Facebook account from hackers. It’s actually a lot easier to prevent a successful hack on your account than it is to clean up the mess after a hack takes place.
This post discusses several things you can do to prevent your Facebook account from getting hacked.

While there are steps you can take to prevent your account from getting hacked, there is really very little you can do to prevent a scammer from cloning your account.
Setting the default privacy level of pretty much everything on your account to “Friends Only” will limit the number of people who can read your posts and the info on your “About” page and view your photos. That simple settings change would make it a lot less likely that a potential hacker would have access to enough of your info to successfully clone your account.

Also, hiding your friends list from the public will help prevent your account from getting cloned since a potential scammer won’t be able to see your friends or even know how many friends you have.

The above being said, there’s still a good chance that your Facebook account will get cloned at some point. If that ever happens, this post explains what you need to do to have the fake account taken down.

That’s all there is to it. Now you’ll be able to tell when someone has hacked or cloned your Facebook account (and which one it is).

Bonus tip: Click here to learn how to lock hackers out of your Facebook account by enabling Two-Factor Authentication on it.

A few years ago I switched from an Android phone to an iPhone. It wasn’t because I thought the iPhone was better, it was because I wanted to do FaceTime on my phone. There are plenty of reasons to prefer an Android phone over an Apple phone, and vice versa. Apple has done a really great job of integrating their products. If Windows and Android companies were less interested in competing and more interested in integration, they would probably dominate. Cooperation always works better.
Enough of that. Apple just got done allowing some integration with their software on the Android platform. FaceTime is the one that most interests me. I FaceTime my mom every day. It’s a great way to stay in touch with the pandemic and FT is, by far, the easiest way to do a video call. You can even add more people to the call, which I just stumbled onto, so that adds some more fun to it.
An article on how to add FaceTime to Android is HERE. 
As I don’t have an Android phone anymore, I’d be interested in knowing how it works for you, if you try it. Let me know.
​I’m talking to you, Vincent.

I don’t typically buy books anymore. I borrow books, I read books in the house, and I download free books to my Kindle from Amazon. I love my Kindle. It’s so easy on the eyes, and the text size is adjustable. There are highlighting features, and you can press on a word and it will tell you the definition. The Kindle site does offer free books, though it was easier to find them several years ago when I got my first Kindle. Now, if you look, they still offer some freebies. Before the Kindle, there were websites available where I could also read free books.
 
The Gutenberg Project, at Gutenberg.org is just such a site. It allows you to read over 60,000 public domain titles for free, and also download them so you can put them in your Kindle library. Following is an article to that effect, with 9 free sites for downloading. Check it out HERE.  
 
IF, like me, you then had a download and no idea how to put it on your Kindle, then read THIS.  It’s an article from PCMag about how to get eBooks into your Kindle library. I chose the emailing method. It’s a bit weird, and it took a few tries but I finally got it to work. Basically, find your Kindle email address, it has a special one, trust me. You have to look it up on Amazon or in your Kindle. Then, email the downloaded eBook file to that address. Remember to use an approved address, also in Amazon. I had to add my regular email address to the list of approved emails, which is different from the Kindle emails. It sounds confusing but it is pretty easy. Read the article, it’ll help.

If you’ve noticed in the news, there have been some articles talking about Amazon Sidewalk, and that you should opt-out of it before it’s too late. Most of the articles seem to have inflammatory headlines. Sadly, that’s typical of the news these days. Maybe it’s always been that way? At any rate, I have 2 articles and a Snopes blurb about it. The articles do a good job of explaining what it is. One article is definitely against it, while the other one is a bit more, I’d say, level headed.

First, If you have an Amazon Ring or Echo, this applies to you, if not, then you don’t necessarily need to read this. We do have the Echo, and have a Ring but not yet installed. There are plenty of creepy things about having this type of device in our home. The fact is, they are accessible by Amazon, and who knows who else. I would say the same thing about smart phones. In fact, I have. Not too long ago I wrote about how these big corporations are ‘listening’.

If you leave your home, you can be watched. If you live in a neighborhood, those Ring cameras that people have are, in effect, watching you. Not to mention security cameras in commercial buildings, and traffic cameras everywhere. If you are neurotic and off your meds, this could be quite upsetting. If you’re paranoid, you may have good reason to be. This is reality.

The Sidewalk is described as a mesh WiFi system created from the internet of Amazon Ring and Echo devices. Amazon will be taking a wee bit of your internet and distributing it through their devices to the outside, and PUBLIC world, where these devices live. The logic is so that Amazon products that use the internet can have better range. It does make sense, for instance, if I put a Tile ‘homing device’ on my dog’s collar, and she gets lost, the Tile could stay connected to the internet in a much wider range, allowing me to find her. Imagine if that’s my kid’s backpack instead of a dog collar. There is definitely a good reason for this.

The problem many folks have is that Amazon is controlling it. Also, that the option is already turned on and in order to not participate, you have to turn it off.

An article that is very against it is HERE.   He does use some profanity. He does NOT trust Amazon.

The Snopes blurb is HERE.   It’s short and to the point. It basically says it’s not the end of the world.

The third article, I think, is a more level headed explanation. You can read that one HERE. 
​
If this topic interests you, then please do read the articles. For those of us in Abiquiu, this isn’t of the most immediate importance, as most of us are still trying to get decent internet and don’t have these Amazon devices. But many of our readers live in cities and towns, and this may very well be something that applies.