Friday, November 18, 2011

Facebook Hoax Claims to Support Wounded Soldiers

This comes from techlicious.com.

"Internet security company, Sophos, is reporting that a popular post making its way through Facebook that purports to support wounded soldiers is, in fact, a hoax. The text of the post is a variation of the following:

"When filling out your Christmas cards this year, take ONE CARD and SEND it to this address: A Recovering American Soldier, c/o Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 6900 Georgia Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20307-5001. If we pass this on and everyone sends one card, think of how many cards these soldiers could get to bring up their spirits! Feel free to repost. This is a wonderful thing to do !!"

While the heart of the post seems to be in the right place, those cards will never reach an American soldier. Hoax-busting site Snopes.com reports that the U.S. Mail will not deliver any letters or packages addressed to "Any soldier" or "Any wounded soldier" at Walter Reed, for the safety and well-being of patients and staff.

Instead, the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center asks that all holiday mail for unnamed service members through the American Red Cross's Holiday Mail for Heroes, at this address:

Holiday Mail for Heroes
P.O. Box 5456
Capitol Heights, MD 20791-5456

Cards must be postmarked no later than Friday, December 9th in order to be screened and delivered in tie for the holidays.

If you're concerned about Internet scams and hoaxes, be sure to read our Internet Safety & Security articles on Techlicious.

Suzanne Kantra
Founder, Techlicious"

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Browser Wars: Chrome vs. IE9 vs. Firefox

Browser wars, shmowser wars! This article is from pcmag.com. 


Yes, Google's Chrome gets high marks, but I will stick with Firefox until/unless Google decides to add a left side of the screen Bookmarks toolbar. This is something that is in each and every other browser, but for some reason Google refuses to add the feature to Chrome.

Some of us have been asking for this ever since Chrome came out, and release after release we expect to see it, but it never comes. Here is the last (most recent) post in the forum where we ask for it!

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Great buy at Costco

I was at Costco today and they threw in a brochure of specials for the Thanksgiving weekend of 11/25-11/27.

One item that caught my eye was this:

Seagate 2TB Freeagent Goflex Desk External Drive. Regular Price is $99 (that is a really good buy as is), but Thanksgiving weekend price is $30 off for a selling price of $69.99!

I just can't believe how low these external hard drive storage devices are priced. If you need a local backup device, you can't beat this deal. Seagate is top shelf!

The argument against this might be to consider offsite storage. More on that later.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Make your passwords unbreakable but memorable

This is an excellent article by Kim Komando. I encourage all of you to read it and implement some of her suggestions. Having strong passwords is very important these days. See yesterday's post!

Monday, November 14, 2011

What To Do When Your Email Gets Hacked

I sure have seen a lot of this lately. That is, I have received many e-mails from people I know that contain just a one-liner url (web site address link). This article comes to us from the techlicious.com web site and it contains some very good advice. Even if you have not been hacked, I recommend that we all at least check out this article. The best and easiest thing you can do is change your password, and while you are at it, make the new one stronger.