If you know what a ‘command prompt’ or command window is, you may not know how to copy and paste from it. Here’s the trick:
1. You can get the window to appear in at least three ways. Type cmd into the search line after you click the start button; right click in most folders while holding the shift key and choose ‘open command window here’, or navigate to All Programs then Accessories and choose Command Prompt.
2. Once the command window opens, it’s DOS from then on. Enter your parameters, something like ‘tracert brianmahoney.ca’ and your window will fill up with all of the steps it takes to get to this site.
3. What if you want to copy and paste that data into another program, Notepad for instance? It’s easy! Here are the photos to show you:
The command window showing the trace route path to Yahoo.
On the border of the command window, right click. This will come up:
Right click on the border, move down to Edit then choose Mark.
Click on where you want to start the copy action. We chose the T on tracert.
Click on the first letter of where you want the copy to start.
Hold down the shift key and click on the LAST letter or number of what you want to copy:
The selected text will turn white as soon as you click the last letter/digit while holding down the shift key.
Back up to the border of the command window, right click and choose Edit then Copy:
Choose Copy.
Open Notepad, right click anywhere in the white part and choose Paste:
There is the text that you copied from the command window.
You may never need to use this but now you know how it’s done, just in case you ever need it.
Since our most popular posts deal with Facebook and WeChat, we decided to add another social networking site to the mix. Sure, there are many other networking sites but we like to offer complete and comprehensive advice, not a mish-mash of useless information. This post is a first look at Google +. even though we’ve had an account for a couple of years. Why? Because we never used it!
When Google + started out in 2011, it seemed to be on the verge of something great, a real contender to Facebook. For most Facebook users, however, it didn’t feel quite right. The interface was too different. Well, that was then and this is now. Facebook has changed its look so many times that we’ve pretty much forgotten what it looked like back in the beginning. To us, and this is just our opinion, Facebook is now dark and dreary. Google + on the other hand is as bright and shiny as a new nickel. (We don’t have pennies any more up here in Canada.)
Here’s a snapshot of our Google + home page:
Bright, open, complete with two different layouts.
Compared to Facebook’s confusion, this page looks pretty clean and neat to us. Additionally, there are two different layouts. Here’s how you find them. Look for the word More up on top:
Change how your page looks with the click of a button.
The left layout is the one you see above. The right one is like this:
This might be the mobile layout, long and narrow.
The layout at the top looks good to us on our widescreen monitor. Actually, it looks a lot like a Pinterest page, right? We’ve always felt that the Pinterest design simply worked. Tumblr seems too vertical but Pinterest has a nicely-busy look. Your tastes may vary from ours, of course.
One area where Google + isn’t any different from Facebook is in how it uses your personal data. Here’s what we mean:
Read this carefully.
This is an opt-out, of course, but it seems to suggest that it’s mandatory. The wording is suggestive, as if Google might use your stuff or might not. Who uses the word ‘may’ anymore? It sounds very polite but it’s aimed at making you leave the selection as it is. Google wants you to sign in to your account and keep it open as you surf the Web. Why? Read the notice. They want to tune their ads to ‘personalize’ your experience. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? We would suggest opting out of this ‘gentle suggestion’.
Lots more to come with Google +. We haven’t forgotten about Facebook or WeChat, so don’t worry. Questions? Comments? Use the form below. We’re open to suggestions, too.
Warning: This post is NOT a guide to stalking. It’s a warning to everyone who doesn’t take the time to adjust their privacy settings. Facebook and Google +, thanks to their interest in making a buck for their shareholders, don’t care about your privacy. The more you reveal, the more they know. Both can adjust their ads specifically to your particular demographic, your pattern if you will, hoping you will buy something from one of those ads. If you click on something, they know about it and they remember it. As you travel around the Internet with your accounts open, they will know everywhere you go and, to a certain extent, everything you do. You’ve been warned.
Here is a step by step, do-it-yourself, stalking manual.
1. Pick a magazine, any magazine. Better yet, pick a magazine that appeals to the type of person you are looking for. Here are a couple of examples, straight from the Internet:
This is from Google + but the idea is the same.
In the above example from Seventeen Magazine, hovering over the Google + icon brings up the ‘Follow’ button. Clicking on any profile photo brings up their Google + profile. Believe it or not, and this is the scary part, Google + seems worse than Facebook on this issue because we do not have a Google + account yet we were still able to view the profiles. It gets worse. On one of the profiles we clicked on, we were able to see two important maps. One was of the school that the person attended, the other was a map to their home, complete with street name and number, believe it or not.
Here’s another:
This is a Facebook facepile.
We weren’t able to find a facepile on a North American magazine site in time for this post but a magazine from Singapore had one. If you hover your mouse over a photo, the person’s name pops up. If you click on any profile photo, you are taken to that person’s Facebook page. Depending on your privacy settings, a complete stranger, even one who does not have a Facebook account, can see everything that you haven’t bothered to hide. Here is an example of someone who didn’t hide very much at all. (We were able to see this without being logged into Facebook):
It’s all there, isn’t it?
Her school, her city, lots of photos…it’s all here. Remember, this information is available to anyone,whether they have a Facebook account or not, simply by clicking on a tiny profile photo. Here’s what we think a stranger should see when they click on a link in a facepile:
Still some information but not much.
In the example above, we can see this person’s school but not much else, other than her name. We are not signed into Facebook, by the way. This person’s profile photo is good, too. It does not reveal too much about the person. Think about your profile photo. What does it show about you? What information are you revealing to the public?
We don’t use Google + (we are in the process of figuring it out) so we can’t advise you on your privacy settings yet. With Facebook, remember that you can hide everything except your profile photo, your timeline covers and any mutual friends you have with the person who is viewing your profile, provided that you have any and that the person is signed into Facebook. There is no need to make any information public, it’s not a requirement. Choose your own level of privacy, one that you feel is secure and, most important, make sure your young friends and relatives have their privacy set to reveal the absolute minimum.
We hope this post has made you think about what information you are putting out for the world to see. What information are your children sharing with the world? What about your friends who are less comfortable with computers and/or social networking? Maybe you can refer them to us or, better yet, help them lock down their privacy using our guides.
In the comment section at the bottom of the Songza page, each comment has a photo and a name attached. This is how it looks:
Comments with photos and a name on the Songza site.
As you can see, we get a bit of information from each commenter, always a photo and a name. Why is that? Because you cannot keep your Facebook name and profile photo private, they have to be shared as part of your agreement with Facebook. Just about everything else can be hidden. Just about, those are the key words.
Yesterday, we decided to play with the settings. First, we commented, then we checked the site from another browser, just to see what we could find out from the link to the Facebook profile. Turns out the comment had the name of the poster AND his location.
We headed back to our Facebook profile and hid where the poster was from, simply by setting Location (under Privacy, then About, then Location and Edit) to ‘Only Me’. Back to Songza to refresh the page and see what the comment looked like after the change. We were shocked to see that instead of the commenter’s location, we were now able to see the commenter’s age! Knowing full well that this person had hidden their age, we headed back to Facebook in another browser to check. Sure enough, the year of birth was set to ‘Only Me’. Yes, the day and month were there for friends to see but the person’s actual year of birth was set to ‘Only Me’.
Unfortunately, we cannot duplicate this error today. The point of this post is to show you that, while you think your privacy settings work the way Facebook tells you they do, sometimes they don’t. If you have any piece of information on Facebook that you think is completely private, there are times when it isn’t. In our next post, we’ll offer a solution, one that we’ve suggested before. Stay tuned!
Just when you think that you’ve got your Facebook privacy settings perfectly tuned, a snag pops up. No matter how private you think your Facebook profile is, something always comes up to prove you wrong. This post is about an incident that occurred yesterday so it’s current and, to be frank, it’s troubling. See what you think.
TIP: This post might seem a bit convoluted, maybe confusing, but the point of it is this: Don’t assume that your privacy settings are locked and secure. Facebook treats its users as commodities, not individuals. You’re simply a means for them to make money. Don’t expect fair or even honest treatment.
Yesterday, May 23, 2103, one of our staffers was listening to music on Songza.com. Here’s the site: Songza – Listen to Music
To save time, he signed in with Facebook. That was a mistake, as it turns out. After choosing his playlist, this user noticed that Songza made use of Facebook facepiles. Here is what a facepile looks like:
Technically, this isn’t a Facebook facepile but every user here is from Facebook.
You’ve seen these everywhere around the Internet, right? A box of faces from people who use or like the site. This particular facepile is a bit different from most. When you click on one of the faces, you get the user’s Songza profile, not their Facebook profile. Seems safe enough, right? We clicked on one user. This is what we found:
This is the user’s profile on Songza.
So far, this seems pretty straightforward, fairly innocuous. It’s not. This person’s profile name is cheryl.hatten.3 as you can see at the top. Is this that person’s Songza name or is it her Facebook name? We typed that name into the Facebook search slot and came up with this:
What’s this? A Facebook profile? Sure as hell is.
What do we know about Cheryl? We know her maiden name is Colley, that she probably lives in Lethbridge and that she most likely works for the Alberta Child Care Association. We also have a picture of someone who may be her daughter. Most likely Cheryl knows nothing about this. All she did was sign up for Songza by linking her Facebook account to a fairly popular and, supposedly, reputable website. Songza, in their defence, may not be fully aware of how this particular part of Facebook is being used. These websites are designed and run by professional webmasters who simply follow instructions and, as we all do, fight for their share of visitors.
Not to get too technical here, these facepiles are all part of what is called ‘Social Plugins’. If you want to know more about all of this, here is a link to the Facebook developer’s site: Social Plugins Songza seems to have found a loophole here since their facepile is linked initially to their Songza account, not to the user’s Facebook profile. The only way you can track down the user is to do what we did, search for the user’s name on Facebook. But wait, there’s more to this than meets the eye.
Farther down the playlist page, there is a comment section. Every comment shown on the page is from a Facebook user. Here is one:
Comments with photos. No big deal here, right? You’d be surprised.
Let’s click on one of the photos or names to see where we are lead:
A direct link to Katherine’s Facebook profile.
Here we go again. You can see for yourself what information we can glean from this profile. If you actually go to Songza and click on any photo in the comment section then click on various parts of the profile that comes up, you’ll most likely discover all kinds of things about the person, things that they didn’t feel were worth keeping private. In several cases we found maps which indicated where they lived, what groups they were members of, what networks they were in, who they were following and so on. Honestly, you would be surprised and probably shocked at what bits and pieces of personal information you could glean from all of this. You’d be even more surprised to find that information that you have essentially hidden by making it available to ‘Only Me’, is wide open to the world.
Stay tuned for the next post which examines one particular flaw in the system. This flaw reveals information about you even when you have your privacy settings set to ‘Only Me’. Believe it or not, it’s true.
Thanks for reading!
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
