IF YOU are into Facebook, try to be careful. The files you share or especially those that your friends share might cause harm, in the long term. As I said, there have been many cases where a man or woman had a photo taken with other people, sometimes in compromising situations, and this led to divorces or fights.
There are also cases when people when people meet persons they should not be meeting and this gets broadcast over their respective social networks.
In a recent poll of US companies, 70 percent of human resource departments said they end up not hiring a person after seeing negative attributes while checking the person’s profile in social networks. This might be admissions of being drunk or going crazy, or the presence of compromising photos or bad expressions broadcast over their networks. Some even put really sexy pictures, too.
Another thing to keep an eye on is what anti-virus companies call scareware.
Have you tried surfing the Web and encountering a popup that tells you that your PC has a virus? The warning then leads you to a website from where you can download an antivirus fix. Some of these so-called fixes are free while some are not. These companies are mostly unheard of.
Experts call these scareware and they have several purposes. The makers could be planning to put into your machine malicious software like keyloggers or a Trojan horse that steals passwords. They might tempt you with the offer of a free software. Or they might just want you to input your credit card number and then make money off you.
Of course, the program that you download and use to scan your computer might actually be doing something and might even pretend to catch a few “imaginary viruses,” but it might not catch the real ones that affect your system.
It is good practice to always check the company behind the software before downloading anything or entering your credit card information. Be careful when responding to pop-up ads, especially if the website you are going to is not that well-known. You can always consult known antivirus companies like McAfee, Trend, Symantec or Kaspersky. Many publish names of bogus software in their sites.
McAfee says that worldwide, a million people are victimized by these scareware daily. These types of malicious software are quite profitable and criminals are estimated to make more than $300 million per year just scaring people to buy bogus security products. Scareware is estimated to have increased more than 600 percent in the last two years, according to McAfee.
Meanwhile, a user lamented that we are always so up to date that sometimes, we become too up to date. With Twitter, SMS, Internet and everything else, it is almost impossible not to know about things. For instance, Pacquiao will fight this weekend. You may have to subscribe to cable for a live feed.
If you don’t and you choose to watch the delayed telecast, then it will no longer be exciting. Why? It is almost a certainty that a website, radio station, news outlet, Twitter post or text message will tell you who won and in what round.
It is almost difficult to watch the delayed telecast without knowing the result. If you want to feel the adrenalin rush and the excitement, you have to watch the match live.
(www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife)