Facebook | Ain't Complicated

Fake Facebook Email

It is not legit.

It’s spam, and likely of the bad kind.

Do not click any links in it.

In the image above, I made two clues be red font:

That first email address doesn’t look real persuasive as a corporate address, does it now?
That second email address ain’t me.

The third clue — the most important of all, really — lies in the links contained in the email.

Notice what shows up in the browser status bar (is that what it’s called down below?) when I put my cursor on one of the links:

Again, notice the red part. If you only read the first part of the URL, it looks like the link points to facebook.com — but you must keep reading till you get to the first forward slash. Then you’ll see the link doesn’t point to facebook.com at all.

If you didn’t know that yet regarding links, learn the lesson and remember it well!

PS: Thanks to the wonders of CSS, the above images are actually the same image. Click on either image above to see the full thing.

Facebook Ads

Mafia this, Hot Pics that, She Searched For You the other, Hot Singles in Your Neighborhood something else — I got tired of nuking offensive ads on Facebook. More than that, why should I expose my mind to exploited (self- and otherwise) women exposing their superficial charms?

I looked for a way to adjust my Facebook settings so I could block certain categories of ads and fan pages.

No luck.

So, being a gung-ho Firefox user, I ended up with Adblock Plus and its filtering capabilities.

Here are the five custom filters I’m presently using:

facebook.com#*(id^=highlights_ad)
facebook.com#*(social_ad)
facebook.com#*(social_ad_advert)
facebook.com#*(sponsors)
facebook.com#*(sidebar_ads)

I also have the EasyList (USA) Filter Subscription enabled.

Presto! Voila! Bingo! WooHoo!

No more Facebook ads!

HT: The Ausbury Blog and Earle’s Notebook

This Is Urgent!

Have you ever felt that way about responding to something or someone electronically?

Blog, Twitter, email, Facebook, forum, IM, text message, chat — having the option and capability to hit Reply right away seems to impose an urgency to do just that.

Most times, such urgency is an illusion untethered from reality. “Most times” — not in a 51% sort of way, but more like a 92% sort of way, if you get my drift. Yes, at the risk of overstating my case, I suggest to you that the urgency of most digital communication is a pseudo-urgency.

I suspect that most of the time, succumbing to such false urgency has little consequence beyond social pressure, inner tension, and time consumption. (That all sounds like something far more than “little consequence”!)

That aside, giving in to such imaginary urgency has far weightier consequences when responding in circumstances that roil personal relationships, easily impacting them negatively.

So I urge you to grant significant weight to my five essential guidelines for digital communication:

If you think your attitude will be milder in five minutes or five hours, wait.
If you think your wording will be more careful after an hour’s worth (or a day’s worth) of thoughtful editing and review, wait.
If you think your present circumstances are affecting you even though they don’t pertain to the message in question, wait.
If you think your choice of expression would moderate significantly face-to-face, wait.
If you think thinking about your response will change it, wait.

Otherwise, figure on falling short of constructive dialogue.

Unless, of course, you’re just engaging in weightless, inconsequential back-and-forth techno-babbling because you can and because you don’t know what else to do and because you want to.

Then you need a different set of guidelines. 🙂

Rip Van Markle

Good ole Rip Van Winkle dozed off…and overslept.

Well, I didn’t oversleep but I did go to sleep in my forties and awake in my fifties.

😯

I guess I should find someone to pinch to see if I’m awake or still dreaming. (One of my transition dreams showed my Facebook account with 100 friend requests.)

Anyway, I went outside and took a self-portrait:

Yeah. Click for a larger image. But I wanted you to see the small thumbnail…and tell me if there’s a sign in the sky for me. (No, no, no! I’m not turning mystical or contemplative or any such thing!!)

I thought it an interesting atmospheric display.

What’s on Your Mind?

Yeah, I know.

That’s Facebook’s line.

But they’ve been having issues over there.

So this is my Pay the Community Back post.

Facebook refugee, itching to tell the world what’s on your mind and unable to do so there, you’ve found a place of refuge.

So tell us in the comments below: What is on your mind?!

Did You Know?

Three words spoke to my heart this morning. May they continue to echo there:

No, you didn’t know that. But now you do. And that fits in with this:

Are you a twit if you don’t want to Twitter?

Last month, Alex Slater took it a step farther. He dumped his Twitter account and stripped the information on his Facebook page to a minimum. Though he has more than 600 “friends” on Facebook, he checks it much less often.

“Being exposed to details, from someone’s painful breakup to what they had for breakfast – and much more sordid details than that – feels like voyeurism,” says the 31-year-old public relations executive in Washington, D.C. “I’m less concerned with protecting my privacy, and more concerned at the ethics of a ‘human zoo’ where others’ lives, and often serious problems, are treated as entertainment.”

Yes, I have a Twitter account. No, I don’t have a raft-load of Facebook Friends. Yes, I think the above article is worth reading in full. No, I don’t plan to announce on Twitter that I had two cups of coffee and two Tylenol so far this morning.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook:

Fast-growing Facebook’s user base hits 200 million

Facebook also updated its display of site statistics.

According to these, more than half of its users log in to the site at least once a day, and the fastest-growing demographic is people over 35. About 70 percent of Facebook users are outside the United States (MySpace still claims to be the nation’s largest social network).

For those itching to know if they are popular enough: the average user has 120 “friends” on the site.

And speaking of friends, do friends let friends over-text?

Hammer time for cell phone used to run up $5K billA cell phone used by a Wyoming 13-year-old to run up a nearly $5,000 phone bill will text no more thanks to her angry father and his hammer. Dena Christoffersen of Cheyenne sent or received about 20,000 text messages over about a month, and her parents’ phone plan didn’t cover texting.

🙄

Meanwhile, some other “friends” are waking up around the globe:

Huge worm stirring to life

The dreaded Conficker computer worm is stirring. Security experts say the worm’s authors appear to be trying to build a big moneymaker, but not a cyber weapon of mass destruction as many people feared.

As many as 12 million computers have been infected by Conficker. Security firm Trend Micro says some of the machines have been updated over the past few days with fake antivirus software – the first attempt by Conficker’s authors to profit from their massive “botnet.”

So, this post begins by featuring a Friend. (And what a Friend we have in Jesus!)

Now it ends featuring someone else’s friend:

Woman finds cashiers check and returns it

But just as she was about to do her part for a cleaner planet and deliver the paper from the parking lot to a trash can, she noticed it was a real cashier’s check with a real signature.

“I couldn’t believe it. I almost passed out,” Curtis, who works as a loan negotiator, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “I have never seen a check that big. Not in my possession, anyway.”

She immediately set out to find its rightful recipient….

Good day?!