Martha's Ramblings

It’s been a while since I posted the first ‘HTML Vista Bashers‘. I still like Vista and the ‘Vista Bashers’ are still bashing.

I keep asking folks why they don’t like Vista.  The answers I get vary, but most of the time there is only one reason.

A favorite program won’t work. When I ask them if they tried the Program Compatibility Mode, they don’t know what that is!

They can’t find anything because it isn’t where Windows XP put stuff. (They don’t look!)

The UAC (User Access Control) is too much ‘in my face’. They could turn it off, but they don’t know that.

Some of the replies indicate they aren’t even using Vista, but someone they know has it and that someone doesn’t like it.

A common response was ‘I read it’s no good’.  No real reason, they are just repeating what they have read or heard.

I think the real reason may be Vista isn’t Windows XP!

Some of these folks remind me of sheep. They follow someone else and never make a decision for themselves. Sheep sometimes will follow the lead sheep off a cliff, at least that’s what I have heard.

Martha

I do not use Internet Explorer. I don’t like Internet Explorer. Rumor has it I can turn it off in Windows 7 and I hope that’s true! I will use it long enough to download Firefox and then it will be turned off.

So if I turn IE 8 off, then what will happen when I want to update programs that open IE when I click Update? IE is NOT my default browser and I deeply resent it when programmers that insist I use it to update a program!

Most programs when updating from within honor my preferences and use my default browser.

I won’t mention any names, but I just updated my favorite screen capture program and when I clicked for the update IE opened. Grrrrrrrrr!

Martha

Some programs are just plain rude. I don’t know any other way to describe them.

Did you want that program to startup and run in the background every time you turn your computer on? No? You didn’t, but it does and will continue unless you know how to stop it. There it is, running, eating resources and making your computer slow. It would open just fine when you need it without always running. That’s just rude!

When you installed a new program did you want it to make your default program for that type of file? No? You didn’t, but it did.  Now you have to figure out how to change the default program back to what you want. That’s also just plain rude!

When you finally managed to figure out how to stop that program from starting up everytime you start your computer, because it was rude in the first place, now when you run the program it puts itself back in your startup, that is exceptionally rude!

Some rude programs want to install other stuff on your computer. Sometimes the other stuff is spyware, but not always.  If you don’t watch out, rude programs will install stuff you don’t want.

Some programs are just so ‘rude’, I won’t have them on my computer!

Maybe I should clarify. The programmers are the rude ones!

Martha

Just about everyone with an email account gets spam, some more than others. Most ISPs, or email purveyors like Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. have an address that we are encouraged to use to report the spam perpetrators.

Don’t waste your time if it is for Yahoo.  I rather suspect the email address for spam reporting just goes into cyberspace somewhere, never again to be seen by human eyes or if it is actually answered, a canned reply will be delivered back and no other action is taken. The canned reply, if one is actually received, gives a solution that has nothing to do with the complaint. The last time I sent a complaint to Yahoo’s ‘abuse@ address the message ‘bounced’ with a mail daemon telling me the address was ‘not valid’.

The same thing seems to be true for the option to “Report Abuse” form that Yahoo so nicely offers. It is a waste of time.

There is a spammer with a Yahoo address that is repeatedly spamming Yahoo Groups owners/moderators. Frequent complaints to Yahoo have not stopped the spammer or disabled his Yahoo.com email account. A Yahoo moderator cannot send these spams to a spam filter as this would effectively remove the ability to handle legitimate requests for members.

Yahoo has been telling us they want to improve their service. A good way to start would be to remove spammers using a Yahoo.com email account.

And before you make a comment that the account may be ‘spoofed’, the headers indicate it is a real account.

Martha

Footnote:

Someone just told me “It’s the Yahoo way, get used to it”. Yep, they are right!

I am NOT a Thief!

I don’t know about you, but I am really fed up being treated like a thief.

I realize that there are a lot of thieves out there, but I am not one of them.  If Microsoft is so clever, they should be able to detect my system is legit without me having to jump through hoops to prove it. But I paid for my version of Windows and I am sick of being treated like I stole it.

Why I have to prove my Windows is legitimate before I can download something from Microsoft is beyond me. Every time I have to prove my trustworthiness. This is just wrong.

Now I have to prove my worthiness just to view a video about Windows 7! (There used to be a link here, but Microsoft moved the video, so the link is gone. Maybe too many folks besides me got tired of trying to prove they are not thieves.)

This is one of the reasons that makes honest people turn to other operating systems like Linux. My next operating system may just be Linux.

Martha

All of us have endured the endless onslaught of Spam for a long time and there doesn’t seem to be an end to it in sight.

In the last few months I am getting ‘invitations’ from people I never heard of to join web sites of dubious value and motives.

First it was the invitation to visit ‘my Refriendz page and see my latest photos.’ I blogged about this a while back.

But now it’s a flood from Refriendz, FriendsClub, Question It, etc and of course Grouply. I expect others will soon follow. It makes no difference, it’s all Spam to me.

I am not sure exactly how these ‘social’ sites work and I really don’t care to find out, other than they annoy folks like me who do not want those spammy emails.

But Grouply really worries me. The concept sounds good, get all of your Groups emails on one web page. There is another way to get them all in one place, folks. Download the messages to an email program or to Gmail! That way you don’t compromise your Yahoo login and password by giving it to some website!

You say, well if some fool wants to give up his or her logging credentials that’s their problem. Guess what, it could be your problem and my problem.  All it would take is for some sneaky soul to scrape his Grouply site to a blog and your email address and mine are exposed to the world.

If you have a Yahoo Group and you don’t want your Group posts on Grouply you can stop it. Just use the information here to keep your members from belonging to Grouply if you wish.  Tell Grouply to leave your Group alone

Once you enter your Group’s owner email, you get a code to enter and then you can set the controls to allow or prevent Grouply from taking control of your Group.

Now Yahoo is trying to get in on the invitations. They call theirs ‘Connections’. In all fairness, they don’t attempt to have users send an invite to everyone in their address book, but some of these ‘Connections’ are a tad dubious.

I just wish these sites would leave those invitations, connections or what ever they want to call them, alone and not keep adding to the Spam in our Inboxes!

Martha

Today I received an email from AARP asking me to take a survey. (Yes, I am a member of AARP.)

I went to the site to take the survey and of course they want me to log in. So I entered my email address and password and then got a message ‘enter a valid email address’. So thinking I may have made a typo the first time, I entered it again.  Nope, ‘Enter a valid email address’ popped up again.

Well this ‘invalid email address’ has been receiving and sending email a long time,including from AARP so I can only assume AARP is having a problem with their site. Their email server is apparently working though, as I received their email sent to my ‘invalid email address’ just fine.

If this is happening to a lot of other folks and I suspect it is, I wonder how long it will take them to figure out something is wrong.

Since most of the time the emails I get from them are wanting me to send money for some purpose or other, I think I will just unsubscribe from AARP’s email.  That is as soon as I can convince them the email they have been using to send me those emails is ‘valid’.

Martha

I really like to receive newsletters; at least some of them.  At one time I did think about doing a newsletter, but decided against it because knowing me, after awhile I would just stop sending them.  If I had folks that had subscribed, I like to think this might have disappointed them.

I subscribe to a number of newsletters that I really like.  If you are at all curious which ones you can read about it on the newsletter page on Martha’s Web. I try to keep this page updated as all good things come to an end and so do newsletters.

Another reason I don’t write a newsletter is because I don’t want to give wrong information about stuff. In a newsletter (not on my newsletter page) I read some stuff about how to fix a problem with Outlook. Now I am no expert by any means, but this was basic stuff and the ‘fix’ was totally wrong!

I sometimes get really annoyed about folks who continually bad-mouth products I use and really like. I have discontinued two newsletters for that very reason. One insinuated if I use Microsoft Front Page to make my website I have ‘bad’ code on the site. I would challenge that person to find the ‘bad’ code on my site! True I remade it using Expression Web, but it didn’t have bad code before then. I have seen bad code on sites made with DreamWeaver which is what the newsletter editor was saying everyone should use. Another kept bad-mouthing Microsoft Vista to the point I just unsubbed for that reason alone.  These folks are ‘trashees‘, and so I left their cyber missives.

Most of the time I learn good stuff from my newsletters. But one thing I have noticed; they are all trying to get me to buy stuff. Generally it is software, usually security software. I don’t mind that as everyone needs to pay the bills. I just ignore most of it as I have all the software I need. I do notice the fact that some of them are insinuating what I have is not the best available.

Again, they are just trying to make some $$ but what they are pushing may NOT be the best! So while I really enjoy my newsletters I am aware that a really good newsletter takes a lot of time and work to keep up with new trends, new and good software, accurate information about ‘fixes’ and it needs to go out to subscribers on a regular basis. (There are some exceptions to the regular basis.  If the subscriber knows up front the newsletter will arrive once in awhile and not on a schedule, then forewarned is forearmed.)

Since lately I can’t even post on a regular basis to this blog, I suspect my decision to not have a newsletter is the right decision.

Martha

Lately I see more spam like this;

Hi!
I would like to invite you to visit my Refriendz page and see my latest photos.

In order to visit my space, you must go to:
http://www.refriendz.com/?do=Login.Invite&rid=someone&email=Group@yahoogroups.com (This line edited)

(If this link does not work, please copy and paste it into your browser or go to www.refriendz.com and enter ‘someon.sm’ (edited)as Invitation ID to Login to the web site.)

P.S. Refriendz is Invitation-Only, so do not miss your chance to visit my page!

Why I would care about visiting a page for someone I don’t know is beyond me. I do know this is one way to gather more information about me to sell to spammers. It could be legit, although it is rather dubious.

Some times the invitation is to update some one’s ‘Birthday list. (My birthday has been the same all my life, don’t think anyone who has needs to ‘Update’) or it could be some other type of invite.

I guess this is a result of all those ‘social’ websites that are poping up everywhere trying to cash in on the MySpace craze. I can’t imagine anyone with a lick of sense actually clicking those links. With all of the malware, phishing and other types of scummy stuff out there, it’s a far better thing to just delete this junk.

I suppose this type of stuff appeals to some folks, but no one I know would want it, at least I hope they wouldn’t. I hope you won’t click it!

Martha

Thieves are everywhere, including the Internet.

By now most of us know about identity theft and are aware of all the scams out there. But there is another form of thievery as well, stealing a website or website content.

Webmasters work hard to make their websites. The really good webmasters learn how to program with HTML and write Cascading Style Sheets, commonly know as CSS. They take pictures of the products they sell. They take care to see if the pictures don’t take too long to load so their pages will load quickly. They make sure the pages are viewed the same way in all browsers, not just Internet Explorer. This process doesn’t happen over night. It takes many days and sometimes nights. Content is king on the Internet and some of us have to really struggle to get that content written. Content needs to be original and not everyone really likes to write. Trial and error is the name of the game until one day they finally get it right. All the hard work pays off at last.

Then one day, someone steals their site. Literally. They steal it by using something called a ‘scraper’. It seems there are some folks who decided it would be neat to write a program (which probably consists mainly of scripts) that could capture everything on a website and then post it to another site or blog. These folks offer their site stealing programs for sale and then the inevitable happens.

Someone decided to use a ‘scrapper’ or something similar on a Yahoo computer help Group with a lot of members, so there is a lot of ‘posting’ going on. While trying to find a solution to stop this streaming of posts to a blog with the very horrible name of http://how-to-make-a-computer-virus.blogspot.com/ (named no doubt to catch evil surfers). That’s when I found out about scrappers or site stealers. Some time back someone on one of my Groups had their site stolen and the wonder was how they managed to do it so completely. Wondering no more, a scrapper was used!

When this article is posted to my blog I am hoping the blog with the scrapper is gone. Complaints have been filed with the bloggers host, BlogSpot, so we will see what happens. In the meantime, everyone of us that has a website/blog has to wonder, ‘Will a thief target my site?’

Martha