We often hear or see posted "My Facebook Account has been hacked".  Usually that is NOT the case but someone has cloned your account and is trolling for friends.

This is an excellent article by Rick Rouse.   Check out his daily tech tips and subscribe to his blog.

By Rick Rouse
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By now you probably know that Facebook accounts are getting cloned by scammers right and left these days.

Luckily, having a scammer clone your account isn’t as bad as having someone hack into it, but it’s still bad – especially for the people on your friends list.

In case you’re unfamiliar with account cloning, it’s where a scammer creates a completely new Facebook account in your name and populates it with photos and personal information they’ve copied from your real account.

They then use the new fake account to send friend requests to all the people on your real account’s friends list. 

And since it appears to the friends receiving the friend requests that they were sent by you, some of them will accept it. This of course results in those friends now also being “friends” with the fake account that was created by the scammer.

Scammers typically try to target accounts for cloning that have a fairly large number of friends, but not always. ANY Facebook account is at risk of being cloned, and that includes YOURS!

Luckily, there’s one simple settings change that can make your account very unattractive to a potential scammer who might be interested in cloning it…

Hide your friends list from the public by changing its privacy level to Only me.

Setting the privacy of your friends list to “Only me” makes it an unattractive target for cloning because the scammers wouldn’t know who to send friend requests to from the cloned account. And if a scammer can’t add friends to a cloned account it’s virtually useless to him/her.
If you’d like to greatly reduce the risk of your own Facebook account getting cloned in the future, just follow the steps below that match the device you’re using to hide your friends list from the public.

If you access Facebook via a web browser on a laptop or desktop computer:
1 – Log in to your Facebook account and visit your Timeline page.
2 – Click the Friends link.
3 – Click the three dots located just to the right of the “Find Friends” link.
4 – Click Edit Privacy.
5 – On the line that reads “Who can see your friend list?“, click the down arrow at the far right and select Only me.
If you use the Facebook app on a mobile device:
Note: The exact steps required to hide your friends list might vary a bit from the ones below, depending on your version of the Facebook app. If so, use the following steps as a general guide.
1 – Open the Facebook app and sign in to your account.
2 – Tap your profile avatar picture in the top-right corner of the screen.
3 – Scroll down and tap Settings & Privacy.
4 – Tap Privacy shortcuts.
5- Tap See more privacy settings.
6 – Scroll down to the “Audience and visibility” section and tap How people find and contact you.
7 – Tap Who can see your friends list? and change that setting to Only me.

That’s all there is to it. Now that your friends list is private there’s very little risk that it will ever get cloned by a scammer.
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Note: The setting you just changed won’t hide your list of mutual friends from someone you are already friends with. However, most scammers who clone Facebook accounts are strangers, not someone who is on your Friends list.

By Brian Bondy 
 
Jake called to say his Windstream was down. Jake lives in El Rito and is a contributor to the Abiquiu News. While some of El Rito has Kit Carson fiber, some do not and still use Windstream. So what does one do when they lose their internet connection?
 
If you have a portable device, you can go somewhere to borrow internet, say, from the local public library. As long as they still have internet, this solution works great. But if you have a desktop or traveling isn’t a good option, you need a solution from home. If you have a smartphone, and a cellular connection, then you can use your phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot.
 
Using your phone, or cellular capable tablet, is a great temporary solution. Generally, the phone company doesn’t allow unlimited use of your phone as a hotspot. However, in a pinch, it works great. To use your phone or tablet this way, you need to go into the device’s settings and create a Wi-Fi hotspot.
 
As that probably isn’t enough to go on, then you should read about the directions HERE. 
 
Of course, the other problem with no, or sketchy internet out here is the no, or sketchy cellular. We live in an underserved part of the country when it comes to communications. I don’t know when that will be remedied, but depending on how important it is for you, you may want to check the Wi-Fi hotspot situation out.
 
I don’t get much of a Verizon signal at my house, but I do live very near a T-Mobile tower. That issue may be a reason for me to switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile also offers a small device called a Mobile Hotspot that acts just like the phone info above, only the Wi-Fi hotspot stuff is all it does. There are folks in our area that use these devices exclusively for their internet.
 
In the Abiquiu Area, the library here offers folks some great Wi-Fi. Other places to get it are Bodes and Abiquiu Inn. I think the O’Keeffe Center also has it. Depending on the outage though, if Windstream is down, you may need to visit a friend with Starlink or a mobile hotspot. 

A couple of months ago I started receiving ridiculous amounts of emails, out of the blue, for nonsense stuff. These aren’t the regular “spamish” emails, I mean 10 or 15 emails for products and services I’d never want. They often looked like a similar format too, where the word UNSUBSCRIBE was visible in the preview of the email. I never open those, and simply delete them.
 
Unfortunately, I keep getting them. What I need to do is mark them as Spam in my mail client. In this case, I need to go directly into my Gmail and mark them as Spam, which I will do now.
 
On my iPhone, I go into the message, click on the sender, and it gives me a choice to block the sender. I can also do a long press on the email before opening it and it looks like it also gives me a Block Sender option.
 
For a while I was getting weird phishing text messages, several a day. Often they would just say ‘Hi’. Sometimes they would say something like: ‘Hey, you forgot your jacket in my car’, or ‘We haven’t connected in a while, do you want to meet up?’. For those, I do NOT open the message, but delete it, and when I do that, it offers to Delete and Report s Junk, which I do.
 
Sometimes a contact list will get hijacked from somebody and that list will be used to contact others on the list, using names FROM that list. That’s how emails go around purporting to be from me, and going to people I know. The emails were not from me, and I don’t have anything to do with it and there’s nothing I can do about it. I have received similar emails.
 
If you want to read more about this sort of thing and get some more details on how to deal with them, I suggest reading Kim Komando’s article HERE. How to stop spam emails: Is it safe to hit that unsubscribe button? (usatoday.com)
 
 

I haven’t mentioned Chromebooks in a while and I don’t want them to feel neglected. When Chromebooks first came out, they were a bit more simplistic than they are now. I don’t think most people thought they would last long, but clearly, they fill a need. The main need is simplicity.
 
Chromebooks can generally be thought of as a computer that has one main purpose, accessing the internet via a Web Browser. However, they are now a lot more than that, and can do many things offline. The Chromebook works within the Browser, but doesn’t require an internet connection to do everything. Obviously, the best experience will be with internet, but many apps are now available within the Browser that do not require an internet connection.
 
When you think about what you do on your phone, tablet, computer, a lot of it is done through a Web Browser, so that makes the Chromebook a more focused use computer. When I am on my home desktop computer, I spend most of my time in a Browser. I use a Browser to get to MS Word, buy from eBay and Amazon, and to look up tech tips, how-to’s, and funny videos.
 
Read about Chromebooks and why they are good CLICK HERE. 
 
Now, another reason I like Chromebooks is that they generally require less resources that Windows and Macs. What this means is that an older Windows laptop that has gotten too slow over the years may be re-purposed as a Chromebook, which will run just fine. A link to do that is CLICK HERE. 
 
The fact is, Windows and Macs operating systems are designed to do lots of things for lots of people, and many of those things are never used by most people. By simplifying the Chromebook experience, it focuses of what most people want to do most of the time. It can still be a word processor, do spreadsheets, and video editing. If you are a professional video editor, than sure, you’ll want a Mac or PC, but most of us can get what we want from a simpler Chromebook.
 
Most games that are in the Google Play Store will run on the Chromebook. So if you prefer playing Stupid Zombies 2 on a bigger screen than your smart phone, then maybe a Chromebook is the way to go. In terms of money well spent, your bucks will go farther on a Chromebook, as long as it will fulfill your needs.

I wouldn’t know about this problem personally, as I have an apparently ancient iPhone 11 that works fine. That said, Apple issued a fix for this problem recently, so if you do have an overheating iPhone 15, you should do a software update to get the patch from Apple.

I used to have an Android phone that periodically started heating up in my pocket to the point it was concerning. I powered it off, then on again, and that took care of it for a while.  Lithium Ion batteries are great, except for that one little self-emolliating problem.

One of these days a different, better battery will come along. And transporters too. And Warp drive, and justice and equality. In the meantime, we wait.

No idea your iPhone 15 was full of rage and heated up? Read about it here.  
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