Scargill

Archive for January, 2014

Right now.. Prime Minister David Cameron – speech – LIVE NOW at FSB Policy Conference at j.mp/FSBLIVE #FSBSkills

And why would you want to replace Logmein? Because right about now… the free version is about to stop working.

After many, many years the Logmein people have finally decided for whatever reason that they can’t support the community that has promoted them for so long and are going completely commercial.  I use Logmein on all my machines – BUT I use it so infrequently that it simply is not worth paying. I must access a machine once a month if that.

So what are the alternatives  – I went out looking and half of the so-called alternatives want someone at the other end to enter a code !!! Not much use if the machine is in your office on it’s own. Well, to cut a long story short – TEAMVIEWER seems to do the trick – for private use it’s free and you can put a code in your machine to let you access it remotely without interaction at the other end – you also have file transfer which was ALWAYS commercial in Logmein.  Works for me!

Peter Scargill

Spent part of the weekend up North with friends – here are a couple of photos I took while we were there – early in the morning – amazing how spending time in the countryside can cheer you up. I’m all set for my trip to Brussels this morning – though to be fair – it’s probably warmer here than it is over there.

So, today I’m travelling from Newcastle to London then off to Brussels – back in a couple of days, got a meeting with some ESCO colleagues from around Europe to attend to. Hoping to grab a pizza from my favourite place in the square. Currently battling with a Chinese supplier to get some code that works for a little phone-type colour display. They are trying hard but I think they’re reading my emails via Google translate and we’re not getting very far!

Well, that was good fun.

This morning, Maureen received a call from "Windows Technical Support in London" – the third this week… and of course she knew it’s a scam and passed the call to me to have some fun.

An Indian lady responds to say that this is about virii on our computer. I played along. I asked her if this was Microsoft support, she was quite shirty, no this was Windows support. I asked her what information she needed from me. Nothing, she said – we have all the information we need. She asked me to go to the computer and press the start button.

Essentially the goal is to take you to the prefetch directory or similar where you’ll see a load of files that don’t mean much – and she’ll try to convince you that this is malware and for a small sum…..
I stretched it out as long as I possibly could while Maureen and I had a good laugh, then asked her if she slept at night and ended the call by making some rude suggestions before closing the call while she was in mid-sentence.

This was extremely funny but there is a serious side – some older folk might be taken in by this scam which is as old as the Nigerian one…

If you get this – play along and then when she (or he) asks you to press the start button – act dumb and then tell them your computer doesn’t have a start button but has lots of pretty coloured boxes… just for a laugh. Then say the plug has come out and can they wait a second for you to reboot. Put the phone to one side and go get lunch.

One clever fellow on the web made a recording of the whole thing in his case (I really do need an instant record button for these calls). Here it is.. enjoy.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/11/malwarebytes

Had a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses over during the hols. I heard the knock on the door, opened it and “Hi.. don’t you think it’s terrible that people live their lives without Jesus” was their opening line. “We do” I said politely in my opening shot – at which point Maureen started griping about the cat getting out so I had to closed the door.

They didn’t come back – a shame as it’s been 20 years since they last called and I’ve been building up my response. Ah well.

A very good point was made on Facebook today… somewhere in the USA, 200 million dollars spend on NYE fireworks, millions praying – meanwhile millions starve.. something very wrong with all of this.

Happy New Year everyone from Maureen and I, our two cats and our new trouble-making kitten!