URGENT ALERT! For users of any Apple thinghy!

Hi y'all and thanks for reading this.

If you or someone in your household has any piece of equipment from Apple, like an iPhone, iPad, iPod or the like then

 this is for you!

Since iPhones a.s.o. are so common nowadays the crooks are targeting you. Look at the email I just got in a partial screen shot of the Thunderbird screen:

 

I have marked the give-away items with colored rectangles as follows:

Blue: I don't have an Apple account! Ha, ha, ha.

Purple: The email does not even come from Apple!

Green: My cursor pointing to the "Verify..." button.

Red: The URL (web site address) that the "Verify..." button actually is pointing to; it has NOTHING AT ALL to do with Apple.

To be addressed as "Dear ejheinze@att.net" is so unprofessional this alone would be reason enough to click on the Delete button!

The item in the red rectangle I see only because I told my email program to show this and because the cursor is on the "Verify..." button. I believe none of this needs further clarification. Should you have any questions please feel free to ask me, preferably in an email.

A general remark: 

If the program you use to read your emails
does not show you any of the information in blue, purple and red
then you potentially endanger your computer!

Any Questions? Please feel free to ask me, preferably in an email. 

Stay safe.

Ransomware - A Current Example

Please take a close look at this cut out grabbed diectly off my screen:

From the top the red frames are around:

1. The virus infected scam email in the message list
2. The totally unprofessionally empty subject line.
   [Bulk] is from my ISP telling me that this email was sent  from a server that is known to send out spam
   FW: tells me that the email was forwarded
3. Addressing me with "ejheinze" shows that the sender does not even know my first name;
   ejheinze is the part of my email address before the @ character
4. A totally unprofessional signature
5. .zip is one of the potentially dangerous file types 

Do I really need to comment? Yes? Okay, here we go:

1. Hm, no subject and I don't know a Jodie M and Comcast in her email address? I have no business at all with Comcast.
2. Unprofessional and bordering on rude.
3. Totally unprofessional and in a primitive way impolite.
4. From Comcast I would at least expect some sort of company logo or an avatar.
5. I wonder what might be in there...
   but with all the above I DO NOT CLICK on the attachment!

Instead I save the attached file and submit it to Virus Total (Wikipedia). And the "success" confirms my suspicion. 17 out of  58 anti virus programs flag the file as infected. See for yourself:

The rest was simple:
Delete the email which deletes the attachment as well.
Delete the file from the computer and
Empty Recycle Bin, just to be sure.

Remember: NEVER, EVER click on an email attachment unless you have verified it's legitimacy with the sender.

Stay safe.

eFax Scam - New Variant Of An Old Trick

Just this morning I got an email supposedly coming from eFax and I thought I better document it here.

Here are screen shots of what it looked like in Thunderbird, my email program.

The sender address seems to be efax.com (green frame). But resting the mouse cursor on the link supposedly representing the fax the translation of the name in the link, that is the place where a mouse click really would take me to, that translation clearly shows a web site in Brazil (red frame). Do you smell the rat?

Just for fun I rested the mouse cursor on the link for Help instructions and that really would take me to the efax.com help page (blue frames).

Although I personally know some people in Brazil. needless to say that I neither clicked on the first link nor did I download the compressed file (.zip) nor would I ever have opened this .zip file. My acquaintances in Brazil all have my email address.

As I always say, user beware.

As usual I welcome suggestions and comments right here in the blog.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

  

Browser Toolbars - More Than a Nuisance

The following applies generally to ALL tool bars, no matter how well known the name of the company is where the toolbar originates from. I chose the Yahoo! toolbar only because it is so pervasive and comes in many disguises.

Over and over again I find the nasty (at least!) Yahoo! Toolbar on customer's computers. When I ask the rhetorical question "Who installed that?" mostly I get sort of a blank stare and the reply "I have no idea".

And I trust that the customer really has no idea. But then, how did it happen? Two possibilities:

1st possibility:
 
You installed a new program or an update to a program you have been using for quite some time. These install processes usually ask a lot of tedious questions and we have gotten used to "clicking through", that is to quickly click on the button for the positive, confirming choice. We want to get done with this, don't we?

This "clicking though" is the culprit. Right in the middle of all these windows is one window that may look similar to this example:

As you can see the example is from an installation of PDF-Creator. And it asks us for permission to install the "pdfforge Toolbar". Only the text by the second preselected check box gives us a hint as to what toolbar this really is. "Set Yahoo! as my ..." gives it away, it's my friend the Yahoo! toolbar in one of it's many disguises!
 

Do you know a rat when you smell a rat?

This is a typical example of how we get tricked everywhere and all the time to do the wrong thing. We have "trained" ourselves to click through and the people out there know it and use it to our detriment - if we let them.

Take the time to really read and understand what these little windows say and act accordingly. The correct action here would be to uncheck the two check boxes by "I agree..." and "Set Yahoo!...". Simple enough one would think...

2nd possibility:

Just a few minutes ago I did some researching for a specific issue in the Thunderbird email program that many of my customers and I myself use. In a legitimate related article in the Thunderbird support materials was a link to Yahoo! Help. I followed that link and ended up with this (partial) window:

 
Do you really understand what Yahoo! offers here? We have to sort of translate the words "...Firefox for Yahoo!". Yahoo! does not have any real updates to Firefox; we get those only from Mozilla.

Yahoo! has a slightly modified version of Firefox that locks you into some Yahoo! services, especially their search engine. Once you have the Yahoo! version installed there is no way to get rid of the "Yahoo! Toolbar" and their "search enhancements"  besides re-installing Firefox from a clean installer.

Do you know a rat when you smell a rat? 

Here Yahoo! takes advantage of the fact that most people don't know enough about their computer and seemingly are afraid to ask before they click on stuff like this.

Why is all this important you ask?

 

Here you have it directly from the horses mouth:

Yahoo! Toolbar "Causes excessive CPU usage"

Ask.com Toolbar "May cause redirected searches, failed keyword searches and/or the "File not found" error..." 

If you want it more technical see Mozilla's own list of problematic extensions for more similar goodies.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

Set-Up Job

Edited March 24, 2018: Problems with Windows 10 "Feature Updates" (twice every year!)Edited March 9,   2016: Block Windows 10 from snooping and Picasa discontinued
 
Every brand name computer you buy in a store or on the internet brings with it three areas of concern: Gunk software, missing updates and costly and questionable "security" software. I'll address these three concerns separately and then offer my suggestion to deal with these concerns before they become a problem.

1. Gunk software: Brand name computers come with some (and sometimes a lot of) "gunk" software pre-installed. You'll find anything from trial versions of programs that will cost additional money to outright spyware and even back door programs.

It goes without saying that this gunk should be removed before you even connect the computer for the first time to the internet.

I even consider programs like Microsoft's Internet Explorer and MS's email programs and Microsoft Office trial versions to be "gunk". By virtue of the very technology used TO WRITE them (called ActiveX) they will enable a large percentage of malicious software to be executed on your computer. Just by using alternative programs that were built without ActiveX technology you avoid all this malicious ActiveX software automatically.

Microsoft's Office is by now always a trial version; it will cost you additionally about $100 to $150 depending on where you buy the product key that you will need to use MS Office for more than 60 days.

There is a commercial program being offered to do this removing of gunk software but the computer manufacturers regularly modify what they pre-install and the names of what they install. Thus a program attempting the clean-up will almost always be outdated and work only incompletely. Or it will offer you a list of installed non-Microsoft programs and ask for your decision on what to remove; and you bought the program because you don't know that in the first place!

2. Missing Updates: The brand name computer you buy was designed and originally configured months ago, sometimes many months ago. For good reasons software companies like Microsoft, Adobe and others regularly release security relevant updates. Microsoft used to do that up to Windows 7 on a monthly schedule; since Windows 8 MS updates more or less continually.

All these mandatory updates from when your computer model was designed until when you bought it are missing. That mostly is a lot to download and install. These downloads should be done in a safe environment to protect the machine from eventual hack attacks before all required updates are installed.
Edit March 2018: Microsoft has a new method to upgrade Windows 10 every six months. These upgrades are HUGE and can take many hours to download and run. IMHO it is imperative to supervise this process and to know what to do (or not to do) when problems arise.
There sheer size and the volume of work to install them is the main reason that I recommend to buy computers with SSD drives; with HDD drives these big updates just take too long!  

3. "Security" Software: All of the commonly preinstalled anti virus programs or "security systems" will in the future cost additional money. Some are considerable, clearly perceivable heavy workloads making your computer slow; see this article for real life experiences with security suites slowing down perfectly well working computers.

Some others are not always working correctly and/or proving their questionable quality by not
uninstalling correctly or quietly stopping to work altogether.

After seemingly error-free uninstalling of some security suites I have found that they left sometimes parts of their software still running. Due to the nature of what these programs have to do these left-over drivers and orphaned processes can wreak havoc.

This clearly calls for a knowledgeable human doing the uninstalling and checking for left-overs.

My Solution: I offer a set-up job for new computers; I even offer a fixed price if I can do it at my house because I can overlap some of the time with answering my emails and other activities.
This set-up job includes:

• De-gunking the computer (manually and completely removing unwanted, potentially risky programs and all kind of trial software)
• Updating the operating system and all other software in a safe environment.
• Installing and updating (or enabling) free security software (currently Microsoft Security Essentials on Win7, enabling Windows Defender on Windows 8.x and Windows 10)
• Edit March 2016: On Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 I install a free program that blocks Windows from reporting back to Microsoft what you do and how you do it (I call that spying!).
  Since about November 2015 Microsoft has begun to "enhance" Windows 7 and 8.1 with some of the reporting features of Windows 10. That is called progress...
• Installing Mozilla's Firefox web browser, my choice as alternate web browser including the best available advertisement blocker and a utility that warns you if search results would lead to known malicious web sites
• Installing Mozilla's Thunderbird email client if so desired including the best available advertisement blocker
• Installing Libre Office (Microsoft file compatible office software)
• Installing Google Earth
• Installing Picasa (photo management and editing program) if so desired;
  Edit March 2016: Only upon request; the Web Album Service was discontinued by Google;
  you can keep using Picasa to organize, edit a.s.o. locally stored pictures just as in the past; there will be no more program updates for Picasa (the current version is VERY stable!).
  
• Installing an easy to use screen shot program (so you can send me a picture of the pesky error message that is bugging you)
• Installing a remote control program that enables me to give you remote support  
• Replacing the always out-of date preinstalled version of Adobe Reader with a free, faster and safer alternative called PDF-XChange Viewer
• Installing a virtual PDF printer; it creates PDF files from anything you can print. You don't want to email a job application as a Word document that anybody could modify! 
• Establishing desktop icons leading directly to Documents, Downloads, Pictures and so on. 
• On Windows 8 and Windows 10 install a proven, small program that starts the computer directly into desktop mode and establishes a Start button and a Programs menu like we have been used to since Windows XP (that is since 2002)!

All above mentioned software is of excellent quality, officially FREE for home use and guaranteed to be free of advertisements and spyware.

All this can take many hours and will seriously confuse the normal "non geek" computer user.
If I can do the Set-Up job at my house I offer it for a flat fee! Should you be interested please send a personal email to ejheinze_at_gmail_dot_com; thank you.


As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

Stay safe!

Windows 7 - Everything Else Is FREE

I read a two part article series on the WindowsSecrets blog written buy Woody Leonhard. If you follow my blog you have read about WindowsSecrets before. I like the skinny of these two articles so much that I "stole" their text from the second part of the article to post it here, with some textual changes and additions to enhance the readability and understanding by non-geeks, IMHO at least.
Most if not all of the software that stores will try to sell you when you buy a new computer does not need to cost any additional money. But since stores and dealers live from selling you something they will try - and sometimes really hard. The most often applied method to up-sell an unsuspecting not-too-PC-literate customer is good old FUD, Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. The sales guys in some stores can scare the daylights out of you just to get you to buy some additional software.
The kicker is that if you steadfastly refuse these software add-ons they sometimes even will throw it in the bag anyway "because it's free"; stuff they five minutes ago wanted to charge you for! If my customers got any antivirus program in this manner I always tell them to give it as a gift to their best enemy.
If you buy a new PC with Windows7 Home Premium pre-installed then there is hardly anything else you need to pay money for besides your fast Internet connection.
Let me go into a few more details for the most commonly offered add-on packages. This first part is from the WindowsSecrets blog with some textual additions.

Antivirus: Microsoft Security Essentials is free and works for the average PC-user just as good as commercial products and often even better.
It runs totally unobtrusive in the background and it's work load balancing is so good that even on weaker older computers you hardly ever will recognize that it is running.
Even while it is scanning your machine you can still work with your computer; I don't know any other antivirus program that does that in such a graceful way.
And if it has to "talk" to you it speaks in clear, simple English; you don't need a college degree to understand what it's telling you.
Backup programs: Windows 7 backup isn't particularly neat or fancy, but it covers the bases automatically and (almost always) works well.
I strongly recommend to invest a little bit of time to learn the ins and outs; it's all right there in the Windows 7 Help and Support displays.
And I strongly recommend to buy an external disk drive to keep the backups outside of the computer. A backup on the C: drive is no backup at all, at best it's a fig leaf.
Defragmenters: Windows 7 defragments your drives automatically (once a week by default), and you don't need to lift a finger or spend a penny. But you can set it to your liking, like have it defragment daily at a certain time - or only manually started. The latter then very soon gets forgotten anyway.
Disk Partitioning: Windows 7 does all you'll need!
No, Windows 7 doesn't have a full-fledged disk-partition manager. But it does everything with partitions that most people need (if you need it at all!) -- and it gets the job done without messing up your hard drive. Which is more than I can say for some third-party disk-partition managers.
Where is Windows 7's partition manager you ask? In an administrator account, click Start and in the Search box type "Administrative Tools", without the quotes naturally. In the resulting window double-click Computer Management. In the left panel, under Storage, click Disk Management.
You will see all your disk drives and the partitions on the disk drives.
Again, I strongly recommend to invest a little bit of time to learn the ins and outs; it's all right there in the Windows 7 Help and Support displays.
Registry Cleaners: Some do more harm than good.
I have never seen a real-world example of a Windows 7 machine that improved in any perceivable way after running a registry cleaner. Registry cleaners and Defragmenters may have been useful for Windows XP (before SP 2) and certainly were a good thing for Windows 98 and ME as long as these programs worked correctly - what sometimes they did not. With Windows 7 I think they're useless, if not worse than useless.
In my experience, working with hundreds of Windows 7 machines, I have never found a single Registry cleaner that caused any perceivable change in performance.  The Registry is an enormous database, and all this cleaning really doesn't amount to much. It is like sweeping out one parking space in a parking lot the size of Texas.
Even Microsoft has abandoned its Registry cleaners. E.g. Windows Live OneCare (precursor to Microsoft Security Essentials) once included an online scanner and Registry cleaner.
(Disclaimer: I can not confirm this claim but usually Woody Leonhard is a dependable source of such information.)
Windows 7's Firewall works only one way, that is inbound.
Like its predecessors, the Windows 7 firewall only keeps outside threats from getting in — it is an inbound firewall. Outbound firewalls alert you when an unauthorized program attempts to send data out of your computer. At least that's the theory. In practice, many outbound firewalls bother you mercilessly with inscrutable warnings saying that obscure processes are trying to send out data.
If you simply click through and let the program phone home, you're defeating the purpose of the outbound firewall. On the other hand, if you take the time to track down every single outbound event warning, you might spend half your life chasing firewall snipes.
Some people think an inbound-only firewall is woefully inadequate. I think it's good enough for almost everybody. It certainly is big time good enough for the computers in my household.

It's surprising how much old advice isn't valid any more!

So much for the part that was inspired by and partly copied from WindowsSecrets. Let me add a few categories that are not part of MS Windows.
Office software: Almost all new brand name computers I have seen over the last 6 or 7 years came with some Microsoft Office package pre-installed.
When you just start to use these programs they will work for 30 or even 60 days. After that point in time you will have to buy a license from Microsoft or your favorite computer store. Depending on the version of MS Office the sales clerk talks you into that is anything between $100 and $300. Ka-ching says the cash register and sales guys in the store smile.
You don't need to pay for this! There are at least three packages with office programs around that will not cost you a single penny! They can read and write files in the commonly used Microsoft formats, at least for texts, spreadsheets and presentations.
Currently I favor LibreOffice; it covers 99% to 100% of what the average home user ever uses or needs; only in very "tricky" formatted text or spreadsheet files you will find some features that maybe are not 100% compatible; in this case the Help forum mostly has a workaround.
A category by itself: Google Earth just because it is such a great toy. Whether you want to check out a new vacation location before you book or just see the Kremlin or Tiananmen Square from the birds eye view, it is worth trying it. Even on average decent basic computers like I recommend to my customers it works very well; the speed of the Internet connection is much more important.
Photo Management and Editing: For the average home user Google's program Picasa IMHO is unbeatable. just watch it finding and removing the red rabbit eyes from the photos of your loved ones. And that for FREE! You can build albums with it, publish photos to the internet so the family members on the other side of the planet can see them and, and, and…
Web browser: If you are my customer or listen to me on WTKM then you know that I strongly favor Mozilla's Firefox web browser. Although quality and security wise Google's Chrome browser is a very serious contender as well.
Email Client: If you are my customer or listen to me on WTKM then you know that I strongly favor Mozilla's Thunderbird email client. I don't even know whether there is another alternative still around.
Should you require any other software and don't know where to begin to look for it, I will gladly help. For much if not most of what you may want to do on your computer there likely is a free solution available.
As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.
Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

Email Passwords – BIG Annoyance

One of the most annoying questions I get all too often is something like:

I installed the new version of xyz (any email program here) and the program asks me for an email password. Can you help?

NO, I do not know your email password! I should not know it, it is your password! And actually I do not want to know your email password! 

The other annoying statement in this context is:

“I never had to type a password for my email; I don’t have one and never had one!?”

In my admittedly limited knowledge EVERY email account worldwide has a password. If you don’t know the password it is comparable to not knowing your home address or your birthday!

If I have set up your email account (the account, not the email program!) you may be lucky if you find a file name similar to “_Email Settings.txt” in your Documents folder; look there. 

If you use Thunderbird as your email program you may be lucky if you look in Tools, Options, Passwords, Saved Passwords, Show Passwords. This is for Thunderbird version 3.*!

Oh, and the part with “and never had one” is plainly wrong. Again, in my admittedly limited knowledge EVERY email account worldwide has a password.

This whole issue demonstrates excellently how much we have come to rely on our artificial memories, the computers. You definitely have typed your email password at least once and then set the email program to remember it. So you never got asked again and you forgot that you even have an email password. 

I am truly sorry, but I can’t help if you “forgot” your email password.

If you are seriously stuck you will have to call your ISP and ask for an email password reset. Write this new password down, precisely, including upper- and lower case! If you have trouble getting that into your email program I am glad to help. We can do that remotely!

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

Thunderbird 3.1.* Finally Usable!

It has happened – finally! Yesterday Thunderbird (TB) version 3.1 was released and my two major gripes with the 3.0.* versions have been alleviated.

Upon the first start of TB after installing version 3.1 it asked if I wanted to install the CompactHeader add-on and the ExtraColumns add-on. I said yes to both and now TB version 3 has important functionality that I did not want to miss – and many customers had confirmed that choice.

Don’t despair if you miss above windows and questions or if you already have TB 3.* running without these add-ons. You can find and install the add-ons from this web page. Search for “Compact Header” and “Extra Folder Columns”, go to their description and download them. Don’t forget to install them after the download!

Happy emailing.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

Thunderbird Version 3.x – DO NOT Install or Upgrade!

For the time being I recommend NOT to upgrade to Thunderbird 3.x.

There are so many people reporting various problems with version 3.x on the TB support forum that I cringe.

There are some functional changes that seem to me to be a clear loss of functionality.

And here comes the absolute whopper: Thunderbird can not import from Windows Live Mail! WLM is the default email program on Windows computers since the advent of Windows Vista in Jan. 2007. The Thunderbird developers seem to completely ignore this simple fact!

Personally I am desolate that I can no longer offer to my customers a much safer alternative email program.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog. Thank you in advance.

Click here for a categorized Table Of Contents.

How to Make a Link in Thunderbird

You are reading a very interesting web page and think "Aunt Mary would certainly like to read this too" or something along this line. As a faithful customer of mine you are using Thunderbird as your email program and you have no idea how to do that. Here is the recipe:

First you highlight the URL (the web page address) in the address bar of the web browser and Copy (Ctrl+C) the URL. For example:

Then you switch to Thunderbird and begin to write your email to Aunt Mary. You highlight the word(s) that you want to become a link in the text of your message. Open the drop-down of the little Insert… button and select Link. 

What comes up is the actual link window (below partially shown) into which you'd have to paste (Ctrl+V) the URL of the web page you want to link to:

Then you click OK and presto, you created a professional looking link in your email. Just send it off...

That is how you create a link in Thunderbird.

As usual I welcome comments and suggestions right here in the blog.

Thank you in advance.