I’m happy to announce that the first four of a series of books covering computer basics and online privacy & security advice are now available to order from Amazon.com (and on the overseas “local branches” of Amazon) for Kindle.

You can see cover images and titles for the books – clicking them will take you to Amazon where you can order them and have them instantly delivered to you.

Kindle books are electronic books you can read not only on Kindle devices sold by Amazon, but they can also be read on free software available for Windows, Macs, iPhones, iPads, and many other devices.

You can view my author profile and always see the most current list of books with this link: Worth Godwin Computer Training on Amazon.

I have three more Kindle books I plan to publish later this month, and I’ll also be making all of the books (as well as future ones) available not only on Kindle but on Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble Nook, etc. I’ll post updates here when they become available.

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

The following audio & transcript are from a live computer Q&A event I recorded back in 2008, discussing a topic which is just as important today as it was then. This segment is a lesson giving a few tips on choosing a safe password, and also explaining a why it’s important to use strong passwords (and why assuming no one would target you is missing the point).

Due to the nature of the live recording the audio will sound a little “thinner” than usual, and I may talk a little bit faster than I normally do on my “studio recordings”. Use the player below to listen and you can find a transcript of the audio below the player.

AUDIO LESSON TRANSCRIPT BEGINS HERE:

I want to give you a couple of guidelines when you’re setting passwords. There are a lot of mistakes I see people making with passwords.

 

You want to follow some guidelines. One, for example, would be to not use the same password for everything. I know it’s easier to remember, but it’s also an easy way to get into your stuff.

 

You have to think of passwords like keys. I would hope you would not use the same key for your house, car, post office box and safety deposit box. If someone gets one of the keys, they can unlock your life.

 

In addition to not using the same password over and over again, which I see people do all the time, you need to use a hard password. A “strong” password is the term. This is a more complicated one.

 

I want to go back to my analogy of a password being like a key. The type of passwords I see most people using tend to be simple, regular words that you find in the dictionary or a person’s name.

 

In a recent email, I told a story about how 10 or 12 years ago, I was working at a computer shop in upstate New York where I used to live. Someone brought in their laptop. When I flipped the thing open and turned it on, I was somewhat dismayed to find that it had a password lock on it, which was pretty uncommon at the time.

 

She hadn’t bothered to tell anybody that there was a password. I couldn’t get in without it, but it also happened to have “If lost, return to Lisa,” or whatever her first name was, and the address. When I saw that, the very first thing I typed in was her first name, and that was the password. Not only did she use her own name as the password, but she also had it printed right on the screen.

 

I guessed on literally the first try. If I had been a criminal, or if someone had stolen the laptop and made the same guess, they would have had full access to everything on the computer.

 

It’s really important to use a strong password. The general guideline suggested for this is to make it long, and the longer it is, the better. You want a mix of letters and numbers. Get it as far away from a regular word that you might find in the dictionary as you possibly can. Mix uppercase and lowercase letters in a random way and even put in symbols like an exclamation point.

 

This will create a much stronger password. You might be thinking, “Why do I need to worry about my password? Who is going to target my information? Who’s going to target my computer?”

 

You can’t think of it that way because criminals these days use the internet. They use the internet and programs on the computers to commit crimes just the way that they used a lock pick in the past.

 

If you think of a computer as like a house, these programs are like a burglar. They can basically clone themselves a thousand times over and go to every single house in a dozen neighborhoods all at the same time.

 

They try every single door to see if there is no lock on the door. In other words, there is no password. They look to see if it has a bad, weak lock or an old-fashioned type of lock, both of which, of course, are easy to pick.

 

To use my key analogy, if you have a weak password, it’s like having a really old-fashioned key in an old-fashioned lock, like something they had 150 years ago. The reason they make different keys now, smaller and more complicated, is to make them harder to pick.

 

It’s the same idea with your password. They use these things called “brute-force password cracks.” They are little programs that basically try all the words in the dictionary starting with common ones. They run through them a thousand times in a minute on each computer, on a thousand computers at once.

 

It doesn’t have to be targeted, but you can still have your privacy violated or identity theft done on your computer if you’re not protecting it properly. There’s a whole series of things you can do to protect it, including adding a firewall and doing a lot of other things, which I deliberately included in my computer training courses, and I talk about them in my newsletter and so forth.

 

That’s passwords.

You can find more in-depth audio and video lessons expanding on computer security topics in my online courses, especially in the Safe & Easy Internet course for Apple Mac and the Safe & Easy Internet course for Microsoft Windows.

More related lessons can be found in the Safe & Easy Email course for Apple Mac and the Safe & Easy email course for Microsoft Windows.

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

There is an online threat which has been common on Microsoft Windows computers for years now, but which is now becoming a real problem for Apple’s Macs as well. Click the image below to watch the video lesson:

The threat involves a scam where a you encounter a website that’s designed to trick you into installing a “trojan”. The trojan attempts to get you to enter your credit card number so the criminals behind the scam can steal your money.

This video shows you an actual example of one of these dangerous websites and what happens if you make the mistake of installing the trojan and teaches you what you need to know to protect yourself.

Update: I’ve resized the video to allow it to play on more mobile devices.

After watching the video, to get more step-by-step help with safely & easily using the computer online, click one of the two options below:

Apple Mac Safe & Easy Internet Basics Course

or

Microsoft Windows Safe & Easy Internet Basics Course

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

A lot of people are unwittingly publishing information about themselves online when they share photos and videos online. This information is revealed in something called “metadata” which you can think about as “data about the data”, or info about the information (data) in the file.

This information about the file can be something as simple and visible as the file name, but the information most people are talking about when they mention metadata tends to be more “hidden” inside the file.

One example is “ID3 tags” in MP3 files which hold the musician’s name and other information, another example is the data in a photo which can reveal mundane information such as the camera settings when taking the photo and the date, but also GPS location information revealing exactly where the photo was taken.

This information is visible in typical photo viewing and editing programs such as Picasa for Windows or iPhoto for Mac OS X. It also often is revealed automatically on photo sharing websites.

A file name could be thought of as the simplest example of metadata since it can be used to describe the contents.

However, many types of files contain more information stored inside a special part of the file. Common examples of files with metadata include music, photos, & video files.

In photographs and videos the camera or smartphone typically records GPS information about your location and this can end up visible to the world when you share those files online.

This may not be a problem with all photos or videos, depending on where you shoot them, but ones taken of your home reveal where you live and what kinds of things you own. In effect, you’re casing your own home for potential burglars.

Most cameras and phones that can record this information will have a setting to prevent saving location information to the image. Consider sharing your photos privately with family and friends instead of in public galleries. When uploading to any site, look around (under privacy on the settings screen for example) for a setting that lets you turn off displaying GPS location data.

I show you how to disable location services in one of the video lessons in my How to Use the iPhone App.

Listen to the audio above for the full Plain English explanation and understanding of metadata and how it can affect your privacy.

You can also take a look at my easy online computer training courses for more in-depth and step-by-step computer help.

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

In this article I’m going to help you understand a computer term you’ve probably heard but may not have understood, and give you some advice that will protect you from a computer mistake.

There was a rumor floating around that Facebook was shutting down for good on March 15th of 2011. This is obviously not true (depending on your view of Facebook, that may be good news or it may be bad news).

The rumor most likely started with the fact that the original Yahoo Video shut down for good on that date. I want to use what happened as an example to help you understand a couple of things that are very important and will become more important in the coming months and the next few years.

If you’re wondering, Yahoo Video was a video sharing service Yahoo has offered for years, and was basically the same idea as YouTube, only not as widely used.

It may not be as big as YouTube, but it’s still used by millions and millions of people, so it’s a shame it’s going away, but is only a symptom of the larger problems going on with Yahoo at the moment.

As a matter of fact, things are not looking good for Yahoo right now, and the company may not be around at all for much longer — it’s rapidly shedding employees and closing down very popular and widely-used services.

This brings me to one of the main things I want to write about: why it’s a bad idea to trust your files to “The Cloud” and give up ownership of your personal or business data in the process.

There’s been a lot of talk about “the Cloud” over the last few years — if you’re not sure what the term means, it’s basically referring to storage and services accessed through the Internet instead of directly off your computer.

The cloud can provide seemingly unlimited storage and basically gives access to the tremendous computing resources of companies such as Yahoo, Google, Facebook and others.

A lot of companies are spending a lot of money to convince people that they want to put everything “in the cloud” and like to paint it as a huge benefit for you with no risks or downsides at all.

While “cloud-based” services can be very useful, they are not without their risks and I don’t think it’s a good idea to rely on them too much. Let me give you an example of why.

As I mentioned, Yahoo Video is shutting down for good in March. This means that all of the videos stored on the service will be gone forever unless the person who posted the video either has a spare copy or downloads a copy before the service shuts down.

Unfortunately, it’s very likely that a lot of Yahoo Video users uploaded their video and then deleted it off their computer, which was a mistake.

I say this because it’s a known fact that people are heedlessly doing this very thing every day when uploading photos to Facebook or to Flickr, or with videos they’re uploading to YouTube, documents they’re creating or storing on Google Documents, etc.

People do this because they’re not aware of the risks and because the big companies who are sinking their capital into developing cloud-based services are doing their best to convince you it’s the way to go.

But it ignores the fact that Internet connections still aren’t always as fast or as reliable as we’d like them to be (which means if you keep your only copy of an important file online you might not be able to get to it when it really matters).

It also ignores the very real possibility that the company you’re trusting your files to won’t be around forever and could vanish or be bought out with little or no warning to you.

It may seem impossible to imagine Facebook or Google could shutting down, or being bought by another company, but you could’ve said the same thing about Yahoo or AOL not that long ago, and it’s very possible both of those companies will be just memories in a year or two.

This isn’t just an online thing, either. Business history is littered with companies which seemed unbeatable at the time which floundered and failed due to mismanagement or bad luck.

So if you store the only copies of your files online and the company holding on to them for you fails, you could lose the files for good, or even worse, have them sold to the highest bidder and put to who knows what use?

The thing is, in many cases the user agreements you agree to when you join many sites says that you don’t really own the files you upload to them!

So my advice is this — you’ll keep hearing a lot of hype about “the Cloud” in the future and many companies will be encouraging you to store more and more online and not where you have physical access to it (like on your computer’s hard drive).

Try to remember that while this can be convenient, it does have its risks and you should at least make sure to keep copies of your files on your computer AND make sure to back up those files and keep one or more copies (the more the better) where you have physical access to them.

Otherwise you may not have those files when you really need them.

For step-by-step help with backing up your computer the right way, take a look at my easy video lesson courses on:

How to Back Up for Microsoft Windows

or

How to Back Up for Mac OS X

Note: article updated 6-12-11, mainly changing intro from future to past tense.

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

A few days ago, I posted an article called Understanding URLs or Web Addresses To Help Be Protected From Phishing Scams which taught you the basics of understanding “URLs” or web addresses, so you could recognize and avoid a common trick used by online scammers to fool people into thinking links in emails were legit.

I strongly recommend reading that article if you haven’t yet, as it contains valuable information to help protect your privacy and security online.

In that article I mentioned an email I’d received which looked like a legitimate email from Amazon.com on the surface, but which was clearly an example of a dangerous phishing scam if you knew what to look for.

Well, as it happens, I recorded a video where you can safely watch as I pick apart the actual scam email I received and listen as I point out all of the warning signs which helped me recognize and avoid this common type of online scam.

I just updated this video and decided to post it here and to my podcast to help you learn how to stay safe online. It clocks in at about 9 minutes long and explains everything in Plain English.

If you’re watching this on my website, you should see two players below for compatibility reasons. The first should give you a sharper picture & the option of full-screen on a computer, the second is for mobile devices such as the iPod Touch, iPhone & iPad, and for that reason is the version which goes out on the podcast.

Click the player below for the high quality computer version:

Tip: in the lower right corner of the video player above is a square button which will make the video full screen so you can see the details more easily. To the left of that button is a volume control you can use to make it louder if needed.

Tap the image below for the mobile version of this video:

If you found this video helpful, imagine how much more benefit you’ll get from hours of quick, easy video lessons like this, explaining computer basics and more in Plain English.

Use the links below to learn more about my quick & easy video lesson CDs.  You can also use the tip I shared in the video above to see the links are legit because they point to pages right here on WorthGodwin.com…

Click for: How to Use Email for Windows PC – Safe & Easy Email Course
or
Click for: How to Use Email for Apple Mac – Safe & Easy Email Course

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

An online scam that almost had me fooled – here’s a tip to protect you

A while back I wrote you about how a number of people had their Apple iTunes account broken into, and I mentioned how this most likely happened due to “phishing scams”.

Phishing scams, of course, are scams where a criminal tries to trick you into entering personal information ranging from username and passwords, to credit card numbers or other information that can be used for identity theft.

Knowledge is the most powerful tool you can use to stay safe. In this email I’ll teach you something about web site addresses which will help protect you against phishing scams and similar threats.  URLs (short for “Uniform Resource Locator” or basically, a website address) can be broken down into smaller parts which can help you understand how they work, which can help you stay safer online.

I recently opened an email which at first glance looked like it came from Amazon.com and was an order confirmation. It looked very official and for a half second, I was totally fooled, despite being very knowledgeable about these things.

[Update: I've added a new post to the blog where I show you the email and go over in plain English exactly how to was able to recognize the scam email - use the link to watch the video]

Now there were a number of things in the email which made me realize it was a scam, but the big tip-off  was that the links in the email didn’t actually point to Amazon.com, although I’m sure if I’d clicked them I would have been taken to a website designed to *look* like Amazon.

Understanding how website addresses work will help you avoid falling for that trick, and it can help make your life easier in general.
Let’s start with the term domain name. We’re not just going to talk about domain names themselves, but also “top level domain names” (TLDs) and “subdomains”.

Not everyone understands what a domain name is, exactly, and some people think they do, but actually misunderstand exactly what it is.  That’s OK — keep reading to make sense  of the computer term, and others related to it.

Phishing scams usually can only fool people if the person doesn’t understand how to read and break down the address of a website into it’s individual parts.  The scammers will make a website address that looks official if you don’t read it carefully or if you don’t understand how the addresses work.

If you can’t read the address properly and can’t tell a real address from a fake one, then you can get into real trouble.

Let’s take a look at the parts that make up a website address so you understand it better. We’ll use a real & legitimate website address as an example.

When you’re looking at a website address, it typically has a format something like the following (note – the example is not a link)

www.worthgodwin.com/computer-training-cds/

You’ll notice is has a few sections to the address, so let’s break it down into parts, using the above address as an example.

www — this is the “subdomain” and despite popular belief, it is optional, and also does not have to be “www”. “www” is by far the most common subdomain, but pretty much anything could be a subdomain, or you can even leave it off in most cases.
But the bottom line is you can set it to anything you want, including something potentially deceptive.

worthgodwin — in the above example, this is the actual domain name. Typically the domain name is the name of the business or organization that runs the site, or it is descriptive of what the site is about.

This has to be purchased, and has to be unique, so you can’t use someone else’s domain without their permission.

.COM — this is the “TLD” or top level domain name. .com is by far the most common, but there are many others. The TLD is supposed to give the visitor an idea what broad category the site should fit into.

.Com means commercial, (although many non-commercial sites use it) .org is some kind of organization like a non-profit organization, etc.

Each country has it’s own TLD, too, like .US for the United States, .UK for the United Kingdom, .IN for India, etc.

Many of the TLDs are pretty casual — i.e. you can use whatever you want, even if it’s not an exact match for your type of site.

But some of them are very carefully restricted, such as .GOV for US government, .MIL for military, .EDU for actual schools or universities, etc.

/computer-training-cds/ — the last part of the address above refers to a folder, just like a folder on your computer. This is normally used to indicate a specific section of the site, and in this case is the main page with information about my computer training CDs.

If you are setting up your own site, keeping it organized like this can help Google figure out what your site is about, and help you get the visitors you want.

So now that you have a better understanding of the individual parts of a web address, how does this relate to protecting against phishing scams?

Well, first off, anytime you see a link in an email, you can put your mouse pointer over it and see where the link will take you.  If the link doesn’t match the supposed sender, that’s a dead giveaway.

So if the email is supposed to be from Amazon.com, but the link actually points to someplace completely different, do not click on the link!

But some scammers get a little more clever with it and will make the link point to something like:

amazon.fakesite.com

See what they did there?

If you look at that with understanding of website addresses, you’ll see the fake address has Amazon in the address, but it’s the *subdomain* not the domain name!

That should clearly tell you that the site is NOT Amazon.com, but someone who doesn’t understand the difference could fall for that trick very easily.

And that’s the tip I wanted to share with you to help keep you safe.

One last thing — I mentioned you can put your mouse pointer over a link and leave it there for a moment to see where the link will take you.

On most email programs and web browsers, the link address will show up on the very bottom of the window in something called the “status bar”. If you don’t see the status bar at the bottom of your email window, look in the “View” menu and you should see an option to show or hide the status bar.  The exact location of this menu option varies from one program to the next, but it’s generally found in the View menu somewhere.

The one big exception to this is newer versions of the Mac OS X Mail program did away with the status bar and instead the address will show up in a “tool tip” which is like a little word bubble which appears after a second or two when you put your mouse pointer over the link.

Why not test this tip out with the links below.  The links take you to my website to a page where you can find out more about my easy video lesson CD course on Safe and Easy Email — included in the lessons is a lot more info on protecting yourself online (including video lessons showing you more like what I talked about in this article), plus simple basics of how to use email and more.

Here are the links to try out:

If you have a PC running any version of Windows:

Microsoft Windows How to Use Email Safely

If you have an Apple Mac computer running OS X:

Apple Mac How to Use Email Safely

When you put your pointer over either link you’ll see it points directly to my website and so is safe to click.

I hope that helps, and that you stay safe and have a great day.

Until next time, take care, and enjoy,

Worth Godwin
Plain English Simplicity For This Complex Modern World

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

I’ve been trying to get caught up so I could have a chance to write a new article for my blog, so with this recent story to illustrate a point, I thought I’d share this important advice to protect your privacy and security.

I don’t know if you’ve heard about the recent news about people who had their cards charged against their will by Apple’s iTunes Store, but it’s been all over the news, at least in the tech world.

A lot of people have been blaming Apple and saying the iTunes App Store was hacked, but it looks like a problem with passwords.

In this article I’ll help you understand what happened, and give you a few tips to avoid similar problems.

First off, if you’re not familiar with it, the App Store is part of Apple’s iTunes Store, and is an online market where you can get free or paid “Apps” for mobile devices such as the iPod Touch, iPhone, and the iPad.

Apps are basically programs (also called applications) just like you would find on your computer, but designed to run on a mobile device like a smartphone.

Apple’s App Store lets you browse through thousands of these apps which let you do a wide variety of things from keeping up with news, to reading a book, to working with photos, to playing games, and a lot more.

Again, the same basic idea as an application or program for a computer, just the “pocket sized” edition, so to speak.

The App Store can be found within the iTunes program on your computer, or by using the App Store icon on an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Other companies also provide app stores for their devices.

So what happened with these unauthorized charges everyone is talking about?

Well, basically what happened is, people noticed that 40 out of 50 of the top-ranked apps (ranked in terms of copies sold) in the books category were all from the same person!

This seemed a little suspicious that one person would have managed to pull this off without being up to something. The next piece of the puzzle turned up when people started reporting unwanted charges on their accounts for hundreds or even in some cases over a thousand dollars, all orders for Apple Apps.

It seems that somehow criminals had gained access to at least a few hundred accounts people had on iTunes, they’d been used to place orders for dozens of apps, racking up big bills for each person who had been victimized.

Some people thought the App Store itself had been hacked, but most likely the each account had been broken into individually, probably by one of two means.

The first is known as a “brute force password crack”, and it’s where a program is used to try one password after another, starting with common ones, until the right one is guessed.

This may sound like a time-consuming process that no one would ever bother with, but remember it’s a program that does it automatically, and it starts with the easy to guess common passwords that so many people make the mistake of using.

The other possibility is that the passwords were stolen via a “phishing scam”, which is were people are tricked into entering their passwords into a website designed to look legit, but which is not.

Who is to blame?

At this point, the people behind it are unknown, but seem to be based in Asia. It is most likely an organized criminal organization instead of just one person acting alone.

Here’s what to do if you have an iTunes Store account:

If you’re concerned your account may have been compromised, you can find out by opening iTunes on your computer, then clicking the iTunes Store on the left side.

Then click your email address where it appears in the upper right of the window and you’ll be asked for your password. It’s OK to enter it there.

Once you log in, you’ll see a list of account-related items, including a “Purchase History” button you can click to look over any orders. You should be able to spot if there are items listed which you never ordered.

On the accounts screen you can also click the button “Edit Account Info” to change your password as a precaution.

If you find fraudulent charges, you can call Apple at: 1-800-275-2273 (to talk to a real person, press 0 at each prompt)

Here are a few tips for being safe with passwords:

1) Avoid using a simple word as your password, especially easy to guess things such as your name, your child or pet’s name, your phone number, the word ‘password’, etc.

Basically avoid anything you’d find in the dictionary to start with.

2) Don’t use the same password for everything – passwords are like keys, and I don’t think you’d hire a locksmith who used the same lock & key for every door and every customer. Don’t make the
same mistake with your passwords!

3) Longer and more complicated passwords are safer: as I mentioned above, brute force cracking methods will basically run through the dictionary when trying to break in — the longer the password is, and the more you mix in numbers with letters, UPPER and lower case letters (liKe THis), and even punctuation, the better.

4) Be careful about where you enter in your username and password information, and especially be wary of emails that come out of the blue asking you to “reset your account”, “update your information”, etc. And make sure that you look at the address bar on the top of your web browser window and read the address to make sure you’re on an official site when you sign in.

If you want to learn more, I talk more in depth about passwords and safety on a variety of my easy computer lesson CDs available on my website, including on the CD “5 Common & Costly Computer Mistakes and How to Avoid Making Them Yourself” which is part of the Windows Basics and the Apple Mac Basics bundles.

I also have CDs with audio and video lessons on how to recognize and avoid the phishing scams I mentioned earlier, which can help protect you against having your password or other important information stolen.

You can learn more and stay safer by taking a look at my easy, Plain English lesson CDs by visiting:

On that page you can either scroll down for written and video testimonials, or click the Apple Mac training or the Windows computer training links to see the list of lessons for your computer type.

Either way, I hope this lesson helps you stay safe and secure. If you have questions or comments about any of this, feel free to scroll down and use the comments box below.

Until next time, take care, and enjoy,

Worth Godwin
Plain English Simplicity For This Complex Modern World

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

In this computer question & answer audio lesson, I’m answering a question sent in by subscriber Patt Davis who writes:

“Hello Worth,
I have been enjoying your advice for some time now and I appreciate the help.

My computer just recently has been hijacked by a so called Windows Security Alert that wants me to purchase their anti-virus software and it will not let me access any other program other than the internet.

No exe programs will run. Not even my magicjack phone. Keep getting a warning pop-up. Has a green sheild with a check in the middle. Keeps looping back to their site for me to purchase it.

Is there anything I can do on my own to stop this? Or will I have to take my hard drive in to have a professional clean it? I do have AVG but of course this virus will not let me run it… any suggestions?

Thank you,
Patt Davis”

This kind of problem is very common these days, and is caused by something called “hijackware”. Listen to this audio computer lesson to hear my suggestions about what to do if your computer is infected, plus tips on how to avoid getting infected in the first place.

Computer security is a complex topic and is an issue not just for Windows computers but also Apple’s Macs, despite what many people think. If you need more help, you’re not alone.

I suggest taking a look at my Safe and Easy Internet course CDs, which are available for either Apple Mac or Windows PC. Both versions include lessons on recognizing and avoiding problems like these, including one lesson which safely lets you see a common example of the tactics used by malicious sites which try to trick you into infecting your computer.

You get to see step-by-step exactly what to look for, and what to do if you encounter a site like that, including the BIG mistake most people make and how to avoid making it yourself. And that’s just one of the dozens of quick, easy lessons you get.

Take a look at one of the two links below, depending on which type of computer you use:

Basics of Using the Internet Safely & Easily for Microsoft Windows PCs

or

Basics of Using the Internet Safely & Easily for Apple Mac OS X

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

I’ve recorded a new audio lesson to help warn you about a pretty common email scam which is going around these days. It’s not brand new, but not everybody knows about it so I wanted to post this new computer lesson to help you protect yourself.

I received an email which appeared to be from a newsletter subscriber named John, but I spotted it as a scam as I’ve seen this type of thing before.  It was clearly sent from an email address which had been broken into, and the criminal who did so used the address to try to fool me and everyone else they sent it to into thinking they were the actual owner of the email account.

I’ll post the audio lesson below and then quote the email below that so you can take a look to help you recognize and avoid similar scams in the future:

Here’s the email I received (full name and details removed for privacy) :

“Hello

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

This audio computer lesson departs from the usual computer question & answer format – I recorded this lesson to help you stop wasting time and clogging up inboxes with those virus warnings everyone likes to forward around.

In my experience, these virus warnings are usually either mostly or completely false, and don’t help protect anyone, because they’re hoaxes.  There’s a saying that a good lie is based at least partially on truth, and I guess that applies to virus hoaxes too.  Listen in as I separate the lies from the truth in one common email hoax, using it as an example to help you recognize the patterns of these fake emails so you can avoid being taken in by them.

You can read the full text of the email hoax below and read along as I pick it apart and explain why much of it doesn’t make sense, and show you some of the telltale signs it’s yet another hoax:

> **HUGE VIRUS COMING ! PLEASE READ & FORWARD !
>
>
> This has been checked with Norton Anti-Virus, and they are gearing up
> for this virus! and also checked Snopes, and it is for real. Get
> this E-mail message sent around to all your contacts ASAP.
>
> PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CONTACTS!
>
>
> You should be alert during the next few days. Do not open any message
> with an attachment entitled ‘POSTCARD FROM HALLMARK,’regardless of
> who sent it to you. It is a virus which opens A POSTCARD IMAGE, which
> ‘burns’ the whole hard disc C drive of your computer.
>
> This virus will be received from someone who has your e-mail address
> on his/her contact list. That is the reason why you need to send this
> e-mail to all your contacts. It is better to receive this message 25
> times than to receive the virus and open it!
>
> If you receive a mail called’ POSTCARD,’ even if it is sent to you by
> a friend, do not open it! Shut down your computer immediately. This
> is the worst virus announced by CNN.
>
> It has been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus
> ever. This virus was discovered by McAfee yesterday, and there is no
> repair yet for this kind of virus. This virus simply destroys the
> Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information is kept.
>
> COPY THIS E-MAIL, AND SEND IT TO YOUR FRIENDS. REMEMBER: IF YOU SEND
> IT TO THEM, YOU WILL BENEFIT ALL OF US**

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

This latest computer question comes from Taj Abed who writes:

“Hello, thanks for information. I want to know about PC safety, please describe it to me. I really need to find out about it.”

This is a kind of general question and there’s just a ton of information I could cover that could help you keep your computer running more securely. What I did was give you four basic steps you can take to help increase your computer’s security.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I’ve taken the time to explain everything in Plain English with some comparisons to real-world things which should help it all make more sense to you.

For step-by-step video lessons covering Internet basics as well as safety and security, you might consider my easy video lesson CDs:

Apple Mac How to Internet Skills CDs

or

Windows PC How to Internet Skills CDs

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

Scroll down for step-by-step, Plain English video computer lesson on
how to fix your Facebook privacy settings…

If you’ve been a student of mine for a while, you know I am very big on personal privacy and security issues and talk a lot about the importance of being careful about what you say and do online as it creates a permanent record that is shared with absolutely anybody and everybody who has an Internet connection.

I’m sure you’re aware that Facebook is an immensely popular social networking website and hundreds of millions of people use the service. However, what not everyone realizes (or thinks about) is that while the site can be a great way to connect with other people, there is a giant corporation behind it who absolutely does not have your personal interests in mind.

This has become increasingly obvious in recent months as Facebook has been making changes it claims are for your benefit, but these changes show a complete disregard for personal privacy by automatically setting your account to share everything it can with the entire world, while also allowing people you may not even know to not only see this personal information but share it with strangers without your permission.

To make matters worse, Facebook has deliberately made changing these settings to give you more privacy more confusing than they need to — in hopes of taking advantage of lazy or inexperienced computer users.

Well, I don’t think they should be able to take advantage of people in that way, so I’ve posted this step-by-step video lesson which shows you how to fix your Facebook privacy settings so you can protect yourself.  The video is about 14 minutes long and not just shows you the steps, but helps you understand what the different settings mean and how they affect your privacy and security.

Note: to make this video as compatible as possible so the most people can benefit from it (including people who might want to watch from their mobile device such as an iPhone or iPad) the picture quality is not nearly as sharp as I’m able to make it on my lesson CDs, but still contains all of the Facebook privacy settings so you can protect yourself.

I will be posting a follow-up video soon where I show you the steps to fix the brand new threat to your privacy called “Instant Personalization” that Facebook recently introduced as soon as the option shows up in my account so I can record it.

To improve compatibility so the site works for not just computers but mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads, I’ve added the video lesson two different ways. The first video player below should play on pretty much any laptop or desktop computer. The second is designed for iPhone & iPad, but should work on many computers and other devices too.

If you see a video player box directly below, watch the video lesson by using the first player. During playback you can click the square button in the lower right corner of the video to make it full screen:

If you don’t see a video player above this line (or it has an error message in it), then you should be able to use the second player below to watch the lesson:

If you want to learn more about how to safely and easily use the Internet while becoming more confident and skilled, you might want to take a look at my easy computer lesson CDs.  I have a set of easy lesson CDs specifically on the fundamentals of safe & easy web browsing and a lot more, which you can learn more about by clicking one of the two links below.

Windows PC users click for Internet basics lesson CDs for Windows

or

Apple Mac users click for Internet basics lesson CDs for Mac

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.