Friday, March 11, 2011

Making Money Scams

On Monday night, I watched my primary, The Final Phrase host Lawrence O’Donnell.
Though O’Donnell laudably tried using to focus the audience’s awareness onand hopefully final, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen beneath for excellent, I used to be overtaken, not through the pulling on the thread, plus the voracious audience he serves. It didn’t make me unhappy, it designed me angry.

In relation to celebrities, we can be a heartless country, basking in their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Seashore. The impulse is understandable, to some degree. It may be grating to listen to complaints from persons who appreciate privileges that most of us can’t even visualize. Once you can not muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who tends to make a great deal more dough to get a day’s perform than the majority of us will make in the decade’s time, I guess I cannot blame you.



Together with the fast tempo of occasions on the net in addition to the information revolution sparked through the Online, it is pretty very easy for the technological know-how marketplace to believe it’s exceptional: frequently breaking new ground and doing issues that no one has ever before completed before.

But there are actually other types of small business which have previously undergone several of the similar radical shifts, and also have just as terrific a stake from the potential.

Get healthcare, for example.

We typically presume of it being a tremendous, lumbering beast, but in fact, medicine has undergone a sequence of revolutions with the previous 200 many years that are at the very least equal to those we see in solutions and specifics.

Much less understandable, but nevertheless within just the norms of human nature, will be the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and find out more about the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but on the blithe interviewer Sheen’s life as we pass it within the proper lane of our each day lives. To become honest, it could possibly be tough for persons to discern the variation among a run-of-the-mill attention whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its individual merits, a quote like “I Am On a Drug. It’s Referred to as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we can’t all be anticipated to get the total measure of someone’s existence just about every time we listen to a little something funny.

Swift ahead to 2011 and I'm wanting to investigate indicates of being a bit more business-like about my hobbies (generally songs). From the finish of January I had manned up and started off to advertise my weblogs. I had developed various totally different blogs, which were contributed to by close friends and colleagues. I promoted these activities because of Facebook and Twitter.


2nd: the little abomination the Gang of 5 on the Supream Court gave us a yr or so ago (Citizens Inebriated) in fact contains somewhat bouncing betty of its very own that may quite effectively go off with the faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Because this ruling extended the idea of “personhood” to the two businesses and unions, to strive to deny them any correct to operate within just the legal framework that they were organized beneath deprives these “persons” of the freedoms of speech, association and movement. Which suggests (when yet again, quoting law college skilled friends and family) that possibly the courts ought to uphold these rights for your unions (as person “persons” as guaranteed by the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they've to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights must utilize to important firms, also.





There are two major economies today in the world which are growing at a fast rate — India & China. In fact, both are being watched closely, and analysts predict that they will be the future economic super powers. There are varying reports as to who is outpacing the other.


Sadly though, there has been a negative side of this development as well: corruption and scandals are increasing alarmingly. And the magnitude of loot involved, as well as the large number of cases which are surfacing, makes one wonder what cost will society have to bear if unbridled corruption wreaks disaster on the development phenomenon. For, though scandals have been exposed and investigations are ordered, there has never been a single case of public money having been recovered. It is you and I who have to make good this loss to state exchequer by paying additional taxes.


In the eighties, there was the Bofors scandal. Rhetoric & politics aside, nothing tangible has happened to this date. Then there were stock market scandals, fodder scam and several others. But, what is being witnessed in the last few months in India is unprecedented.  First, there was this Commonwealth Games scam (Rs. 15000 million or US $326 million), {Rs. 1300 Crore deficit for Commonwealth Games, taxpayers will Pay} followed by the biggest ever 2G Spectrum Scam [] {What is 2G Spectrum?} (Rs. 1700000 million or US $ 38260 million). The list of recent spate of scams is long.


The deadliest cancer society is afflicted with today is corruption. If you it look up on Wikipedia, it describes the adjective form corrupt as ‘utterly broken’. That precisely describes the state of society as a result of this rotten practice by human beings the world over.


The disregard for spiritual or moral conduct for material pursuits leads to a depraved mental state in which the individual chases illicit wealth or other objects of desire.


This is an attempt to reflect on the many dimensions of this pervasive hydra-headed monster. At the extreme inner core of this evil practice is the perverse desire of the individual for self-gratification borne out of extreme greed. The frustrating thought that it has not been controlled, let alone eradicated, even though it is projected to be unlawful and damaging to society, makes me sick.

Continued on the next page


The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is famous for having the world's largest collection of Vincent Van Gogh's drawings and paintings. But it has another reason to draw our attention today - scammers have managed to compromise its official Facebook presence.


Regular readers of Sophos's Naked Security site will be only too familiar with the survey scams that plague Facebook, spread usually via rogue applications that have used social engineering to trick innocent users into giving their permission to post to their walls.


What may surprise some is that this isn't just a problem for your personal Facebook pages - it can also affect fan pages which you may administer (for instance, pages which represent your organisation or company).


In other words, if your personal page falls foul of a scam then the bad guys can also automatically post messages to your company Facebook page too - potentially impacting the thousands of fans you have been carefully nurturing.



Clicking on the link takes you to a version of the money-making "I was logged into Facebook for XXXX hours in 2010" scam that we have warned Facebook users about before.


The Van Gogh Museum has posted an update on its page, apologising for the spam messages and asking how it can prevent the abuse happening again:



We're so sorry about the automatic spam messages that seem to keep on appearing on this page about the hours we've been loged on to facebook. We did not post these! Does anyone know how we could prevent this happening again?


Normally, it's pretty straight forward to clean-up your Facebook account after being hit by a survey scam. I described how to do it in a video I made late last year, where I show how you can clean out rogue applications that you have mistakenly allowed to access your Facebook profile.


I would suggest that all of the Van Gogh Museum's Facebook administrators follow that advice and make sure that they have locked down their Facebook profiles appropriately and chosen hard-to-crack unique passwords.


But there may be another issue.


The scammers have posted messages to the Van Gogh Museum's Facebook page via the Mobile Uploads photo gallery.


That's the facility Facebook supplies to post status updates to your Facebook page remotely, just by sending an email to a unique address (every Facebook account has a specific email address for this purpose).



If someone was able to work out the museum's unique email address for uploading mobile photographs then they would be able to post photos (and links to their survey scams) with ease.


It may, therefore, be time for the museum to refresh its mobile upload email address. By the way, it's not clear to me if you can tell Facebook to not allow any email address to be used for mobile uploads, but I would imagine that many institutions would find the permanent blocking of the feature attractive.


There's a lesson here for everybody, of course. If your company runs a Facebook page then you and your administrators will need to be on their toes to prevent harm being done if scammers manage to compromise it.


Learn more about the different threats which Facebook users and companies face by joining the Sophos page on Facebook.


Hat tip: Thanks to Naked Security reader Aniko for informing us about the incident involving the Van Gogh museum.


Source: http://removeripoffreports.net/ corporate Reputation Management

The ultimate in repairing a bruised reputation for business

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