I keep writing about phishing scams because people keep falling for them. They are so common, and some can be quite persuasive. It’s understandable to click on a link in an email purporting to be from UPS saying there is a delay in your delivery, especially if you are actually expecting a UPS package.

Phishing scams are ‘Fishing' for information, using bait such as delivery has been delayed, a bank account has been compromised, or your email has been accessed on a new device, in China, was it you? Those are just a few, and generally, all fake. One scam recently has been the ‘unusual sign on activity’ mail. It suggests your email was accessed somewhere or sometime which could not have been you. A link is provided if it wasn’t you. DON’T CLICK THE LINK. It leads to trouble.

There are common variations on the theme, and I get legitimate ones from Gmail, but there are no links. That’s a clue. The Gmail emails tell me to go to my Gmail account and do something, rather than provide a link. That’s what to look out for, as the link is the hook, and you are the ‘fish’.

You can read about this sort of thing HERE. 
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I get phishing on my cell phone too. I just delete the text messages and have no idea what the goal is. Often, it’s seemingly innocuous asking me why I haven’t called lately, or they left their coat in my car, short messages, nothing identifiable. Weird. When I delete them the option to also report as spam comes up, which I do. With emails, I do the same, send to junk folder and report. I don’t know that it does any good, but I feel better doing it.

I was recently contacted to work on a computer where she said her Gmail was no longer working. She was using Outlook 2013 and had no longer been receiving any Gmail messages. In the past, I would have gone into her Gmail account and turned on the toggle to Allow Less Secure Apps. That isn’t there anymore. 

While the easiest way to resolve the issue is to use Gmail in a browser instead of Outlook, I was intrigued. It turns out, for an older mail client, you need to do something different. After poking around, I found out you need to generate a special password in your Gmail account and use that as the password in Outlook. It’s not that simple of course, because first you need to turn on 2 factor authentication in Gmail.

It sounds more complicated than it is, and it’s no doubt more complicated than it needs to be, but if you are using an older email client and want to use your Gmail account, that’s what you have to do. For a written explanation of how to do all that, go HERE.  

​If you prefer a YouTube video showing what to do, then try THIS. 

Now, just in case you thought Gmail was being persnickety, Carol told me her iCloud account wasn’t working anymore in her Outlook. She’s using a current Office 365, so that seemed strange to me, because it was the same problem. It turns out the issue is with using 2 factor authentication on Apple, which is the correct thing to do. She sent me an article on it, and it turns out to be the same thing as the Gmail problem. There’s a way to generate an app specific password in iCloud that has to be used with Outlook. The article from Microsoft is HERE. 
It’s not as bad as it sounds, just something ‘new’ that needs to be done.

To the point
 
A short tech tip.  One I particularly like though. I love my iPhone. I loved my Android. The one thing that smartphones don’t do all that well though, IMHO, is be a phone. My iPhone has been doing some weird things since I got it from Carol. When I mentioned it to Carol, she said it did that for her as well. Maybe it’s the iPhone 11, I don’t know. Anyway, in particular, it loses it’s cell connection. No bars, no cell service, even when I’m in a location with cell service. So I press the 2 buttons, slide the bar to power off, wait a minute, press the power button and wait for the Apple logo.
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As of late, Apple has added a Siri command to restart the phone for you.  This feature only works on iOS 16.
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Restart your iPhone using this simple voice command.  As long as you have the "Hey Siri" feature enabled, which constantly listens for the two-word command, you can say the following to restart your iPhone:

• First, say "Hey Siri" to activate Siri.
• Next, say "Restart iPhone."  (I said "reboot phone" and it worked)
• And last, say "Yes" when Siri prompts you to confirm. (or press the confirmation)

Your iPhone will then restart. You'll need to enter your passcode to unlock your screen.
Much better. Read the full article on CNET. 

Pictures take up a lot of space on your phone. On a computer in general, pics are where the space goes. The cameras in smart phones these days take great pictures. Every year the manufacturers make sure to advertise how much better their cameras are than everyone else’s. Great for us, in a way. It means we need more storage to keep those photos. Bigger storage drives in a computer or phone, more cloud storage, more costly as well.

And when sending the picture to someone, they don’t really need to see your garlic shrimp dinner at 6Mb, no matter how delicious. And 6 months later, you won’t need to refer to it on your phone, a 3” square, at that size either. David, Carol’s brother, referenced a great article on this very thing. Read it yourself Here.
 
Note from Carol:  Images for the web do not have to be large.   Print requires a much higher resolution than websites.  Both my Inbox and I would appreciate smaller images.  😉

One of the most common pieces of tech advice Brian gives is to suggest to the caller to turn the problem device on and off again.  This advice can work on a computer, smart phone, router or all matter of digital devices.   

My previous smart phone would often lose its cell connection and while I could still play sudoku, my email would not download.  I would turn it off completely by powering it off and turn it back on again and voila, it worked.

By turning the machine off and on again, you take it back to the initial state, in which it can start everything over. This is why it will often work and resolve issues. Everything starts again from fresh.

Now of course this doesn't always works but often takes care of a majority of the problems.

​Happy New Year