Spam Scam Emails, What I Am Getting At This Time!

I have been getting a lot of scam spam emails now with subject lines something along the lines of 'Your Order' and 'Shipping Details', etc. I have been in the habit of opening emails now and looking them over closely just to see what scam they are promoting now. First thing you do before you open the email is to hover your mouse over any word or word phrases that are highlighted in blue. Then if you look down at the bottom left of your screen you will see where the link would send you if you clicked on it. By looking closely at the details of the links you can easily see that if you were to click on the link you would be sent somewhere other than any official company website of which the scammer alludes to in the email. Thinking all this time that you have not ordered anything to begin with, or maybe you have. Clicking on the link can give you any number of things. The worst being some type of malware being dumped into your hard drive and causing you any number of problems from there on. This is where an antivirus program would have a good chance of stopping the threat before it could do any harm. One of the most common I have seen the last couple of years is the one where the malware will send out bogus emails to everyone in your contact list and more. I have gotten good at spotting these emails from contacts. I received one last week from someone I had forgotten about and never email anymore and never receive email from. I opened the email and I knew before I opened it that it was a malware spam message. It was easy to spot from the number of bogus looking email adddresses that were included along with my email address. I used to respond back to 'All' and try to alert those people included with the email but I would get some crazy replys. People giving me hell for sending them the spam and other nonsense. They just did not get it from the start. So, I just leave people alone now and let them learn and suffer on their own. Another note here, there was this information from the government years ago, I think it was the FTC or Federal Trade Commission, can't remember now. But, they had a bulletin that stated that you could forward them any spam emails and they would work to try to stop the barrage we were getting. Well, they did a good job back then as things seemed to quiet down quite a bit but over time spammers from Nigeria and other places began to get busy. Back to what I wanted to say about the FTC bulletin. I noticed that as I began forwarding the spam messages to the email address I was given I would begin to receive even more spam mail and with some really weird stuff too. I think I even clicked on one just to see what would happen and I got a virus that I never could get rid of. That computer was retired long ago. I still have the hard drive and one day think I will reformat it and use it for something else. So, last night I sent a spam email to the old FTC spam reporting email address again just to see what nonsense I get back in my spam folder. I have to wonder if we do not have young people working in that department and they are just harvesting all the emails they receive and then selling the lists to the Nigerians. Corruption is everwhere it seems. Have fun, be safe and do not be so quick to click! Buy antivirus software, it's like insurance for your computer. Yeah, they are not all the same and they are not one hundred percent but it is better than nothing in my opinion. One day I would love to sit down and read a book like this or any of the others shown on this page.

Video On Demand, Any Show That Has Aired, For Only Fifty Cent!

As I laid down to take a short five minute nap a thought occurred to me. Having had the opportunity and the time to record my favorite shows on an old Tivo Series II recorder some years ago and then archving them to tape, had me thinking. Recently I purchased the newest Tivo Series III HD 300 hour recorder for the wife to use in the master bedroom. She has a lot of shows she likes to watch and likes to watch them in bed after a long day of work. I still have my old Tivo Series II running after ten years of great uninterrupted service. I don't use it to record anymore as it is only standard definition. My recorder is a Verizon DVR in the main living room and I hooked up an external one terrabyte hard drive to it which gave me over a hundred hours of high definition recording. But, here is the problem. The thought of having to hook up and connect my old Hi-8 recoder deck to transfer anything from the Verizon DVR and then transferring from tape to the pc for use later just makes me tired thinking about it. With all the current hoopla about Netflix partnering up with Verizon and who knows what other service provider, who cares at this point. Somehow I foresee in the future where these big networks will get a clue and begin to build their own huge data centers to archive and store all their video and then connect the internet pipes and allow anyone to download a copy for fifty cents. I liken this to Apples iTunes service. Their ninety nine cent model for a tune I still cannot see subscribing to. If music and video were made more affordable and more convienant I would imagine the whole country and possibly the world might want to add it to their subscriptions. For now, we are just stumbling along and leaving the consumers with not much to digest for mobile entertainment and enjoyment. I for one would like to be able to download my favorite weekly show, CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood, transfer it to my Android smartphone for playback when it's more convienant for me to watch. For now though I just have to hope that the show doesn't get interrupted by the servive provider and the dvr gets to record the full hour and a half show. Lately thought I cannot even find the time to watch the daily evening news that I have been recording let alone my favorite show.