I wrote a post back in January 2016 on Fake Phone Calls. I’ve recently come across another helpful website with more information on recognizing phone scams. I hope you find it helpful.
Archive for News
You may have seen reports the last two days that over 500 million Yahoo accounts were stolen from the company. The theft actually took place nearly two years ago, but it is only now being reported. You can read details of the situation here:
https://help.yahoo.com/kb/account/SLN27925.html?impressions=true
What does this mean to you?
HOW DO I CHANGE MY YAHOO PASSWORD!
If you have a Yahoo email account, you should change your password immediately. Here are the instructions for doing this: (please note, I’ve included some screen shots at the end of this post)
- Click on the following link, which will take you to the Yahoo signon page: https://edit.yahoo.com/config/eval_profile
- Enter your Yahoo email address, and press Enter
- Enter your current password, and press Enter
- Enter the Verification code (case sensitive) and press Enter
- You will then be prompted to enter a new password for your email account
- Finally you will be shown a list of alternate ways of contacting you (other email addresses or cell phone numbers). These would be things you entered when you created your Yahoo account originally. Make sure they are all up to date.
CAN I STILL USE THE YAHOO WEB PAGE?
Yes. The Yahoo web site is still available for use. My daughter uses it for her “home” page!
SCREEN SHOTS OF THE LOGIN PROCESS:
Step 1: Enter your Yahoo email address
Step 2: Enter your password
Step 3: Enter your NEW password twice
Step 4: Enter the verification code
Step 5: Confirm alternate contact information
Microsoft recently released security hotfix MS16-072 last week. This patch attempts to improve GPO security. But as my fellow MVP’s Susan Bradley and Wayne Small have discovered, this new security update can actually break certain GPO based processes, such as WSUS.
Note: Microsoft has not released a fix to this, nor are we expecting them to do so. But the blog posts below offer instructions for manually fixing this issue.
Here are the two blog posts that Wayne Small posted on his site, identifying the problem and suggested work arounds:
Susan Bradley forwarded the following post from Group Policy Central which includes a PowerShell script and further instructions from Microsoft to manually fix this problem.
I’ll keep this short, sweet and to the point. Beware of the “Windows 10 Upgrade” notice!
First, I really like Windows 10, and I encourage people when buying a new computer to get Windows 10. I have also done a fair number of in-place upgrades to Windows 10. All of them were successful upgrades, although I had unique challenges with two of them that took time to resolve.
Microsoft released Windows 10 at the end of July 2015, and made it a free upgrade for most people. In the past six months, Microsoft has been pushing nag messages and prompts to remind you to upgrade to Windows 10.
But, with less than two months to go, Microsoft has upped the nagging to almost full scale trickery. The details can be read in this PCWorld article.
But here is the catch: you may think you are saying “No” to the Windows 10 upgrade by clicking on the X in the top right corner of the popup window. But it’s just the opposite. Clicking on the X is being treated the same as clicking on OK at the bottom of the window.
Please be careful!
The writing has been on the wall for this announcement, as far as I’m concerned, since the day Microsoft bought Nokia’s phone business back in 2013. They spent $7.2 billion to purchase Nokia.
And today it’s announced that they’re selling it for $350 million to IH Mobile and HMB Global.
Aarrgghh …
In April, Frontier took over Verizon. And the fallout is still being addressed 6 weeks later. Today, Charter takes over BrightHouse Networks, and they promise a smoother transition, according to a Tampa Times article.
“When we acquire Bright House, we acquire the whole company,” Dudley said. “The plan ensures that the company that is running today is running tomorrow. There’s not a switch that gets flipped. We can leave them right in the Bright House infrastructure while we work behind the scenes.”
Let’s hope so!
Microsoft’s Technet website posted detail solutions to a wide variety of common Windows 10 issues on May 3rd, 2016.
Here’s a quick overview of topics covered:
SOLUTIONS RELATED TO …
- Installing or upgrading Windows 10 with free upgrade offer
- Inability to activate Windows
- Installing Windows updates or hotfixes
- Common setup, installation and deployment issues
- Windows Volume Activation
- Installing or upgrading Windows
- Configuring or managing the Start menu or the Desktop Shell
- Wireless networking and 802.1X authentication
- Blank desktop or Start Menu
- Sysprep and Imaging
It was in 1978 that F. W. Lancaster addressed the concept of a paperless society. And yet here we are nearly 40 years later and printing is still a big business.
And the forecast does not seem to indicate a downward turn.
OK, so enough of the bad news. The fact is that we still need to print a lot of things – reports, presentations, graphs, spreadsheets, emails, etc. And perhaps like me, there are times where you need to print multiple files immediately.
I just came across a nice little Windows utility called Print Conductor that will do just that.
Imagine you have been working on a series of files for a customer – including some Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, a PowerPoint presentation, several logo images, and an Autocad drawing. And now you need to print out all these different files.
Ugh. You’re looking at a time consuming process of opening each document, starting up the associated program, click to Print, and then click to select Printer.
With Print Conductor, you can highlight (select) all the files that need to be printed, and with once click you can have all your various documents printed immediately!
Here’s a screen shot of the main interface of Print Conductor, where I selected 12 PDF documents that I needed to print. As you can see, it was as easy as 1-2-3:
- Select documents to be printed
- Select the printer to be used
- Start printing
Best part of this, besides how easy it is to use this utility, is that this is free for non-commercial use, and $49 per computer for commercial use. Give it a try!
Active Hours is a new feature recently released within the Insider (beta) version of Windows 10, and will be part of the upcoming anniversary release of Windows 10.
Think of Active hours as your business work hours, or the time frame that you most use your computer. By setting Active Hours, you can make sure that your computer will NOT automatically restart after updates are installed during those times.
By default, Active Hours is defined as 8am to 5pm (relative to your time zone).
To change your Active Hours,
- Click Windows+I to go to the Settings app
- Click Update & security
- Click Change active hours
Unfortunately, the valid range for active hours is 10 hours. And, keep in mind – you are defining your busiest work hours so as to avoid automatic reboots. Personally, I would have preferred if this would have been the time frame when we would want reboots to occur.
And for those Group Policy people, yes, Active Hours can be set and changed within the Group Policy Editor.
Go to: Local Computer Policy –> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Updates and locate the “Turn off auto-restart for updates during active hours” policy.
Google has announced that their Chrome browser will not be receiving updates in the future if you are running Chrome on Windows XP or Windows Vista. Read Chrome Ends Support for Windows XP and Vista.
Consider this as just one more way to encourage you to move off outdated and unsupported platforms.
But don’t think that Google is picking on Windows. At the same time, they also announced that Chrome will no longer be updated on Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8 platforms.
In all cases, Chrome will continue to work as a browser. It’;s just that it will no longer receive new features, and more importantly, will not receive new security updates.
But … if you are not quite ready to retire your XP or Vista computer, there’s a simple way to disable the annoying banner that displays every time you start Chrome:
To disable the banner from displaying:
- Right click on the Google icon on your desktop or taskbar
- Click on Properties
- Click inside the Target: box
- Position the cursor to the very end, immediately after the final double quote mark
- Press the spacebar one time
- Then type: –disable-infobars
- Then click Apply and OK
And, if you prefer a video of these steps, I found this one on YouTube — kudo’s to DiegoG!