allheart55 Cindy E

Today Amazon revealed an added feature for all of their Prime subscribers that provides unlimited reading of books, magazines, comics, and Kindle Singles. The benefit is called Prime Reading and it is not only available on your favorite Kindle device but also through all of the free Kindle apps plus Amazon's Fire tablets. Just some of the magazines you gain access to at no extra cost includes: Sports Illustrated People Entertainment Weekly HGTV Motor Trend Consumer Reports Motorcyclist Bazaar Esquire Of course, the books that are available are too numerous to list but you can browse some of the available titles through the Prime Reading site by various categories or look for these indicators when browsing books on Amazon to find out of the book is available to you under Prime Reading: Amazon Prime is available for an annual subscription cost of $99 per year and you can also try it out at no cost for 30 days. Of course, as a subscriber you not only get access to the new Prime reading benefit but there is also these services for that subscription and many more. Prime Two-Day Shipping Prime Music Prime Video Prime Photos Audible Channels As a long time subscriber I love seeing my benefits grow and at $100 per year it is a huge value in my opinion. Source: winsupersite

Google Street View cars see a lot of stuff when they’re out cruising the highways and byways of the world, including traffic collisions. Whether or not one mapping car in Michigan captured its own accident on camera, we can only guess, but at least one bystander was on hand to snap a photo of the event. Grand Rapids police confirmed that a Google Street View car was involved in a minor two-car collision on Monday afternoon at an intersection, MLive.com reports. No humans were injured, but the Google car got pretty banged up on the front end and had to be towed. The other vehicle also had some damage. An observant bystander snapped a photo of the crash and posted it on Reddit, adding, “I was so stoked to see the Google car that I whipped my phone out,” wrote Nurse-Patches on the site. “I JUST missed catching the crash on Snapchat.” Drugs and alcohol aren’t suspected to be a factor in the crash, but it’s unclear which car was in the wrong. As for whether police have had any previous run-ins with Google Street View car collisions, a police sergeant wasn’t quite sure. “Not to my knowledge,” he told MLive.com. “That’s a good question.” Google street view car involved in Grand Rapids crash [MLive.com]

I don't either. It's the nature of the beast.

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter. The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events. Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time. If true, then the advice for the privacy-conscious is clear: close down your Yahoo account. After all, how could you ever trust Yahoo again? Remember this news report comes hot on the heels of Yahoo revealing that criminals hacked into its systems two years ago and stole the account details of at least half a billion users, and that it chose not to reset users' passwords when it had the chance. And now we know why Alex Stamos quit as security chief at Yahoo to join Facebook: Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recent directive and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said. They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources. The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in. When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails. Sheesh... Of course, it's possible that the FBI or NSA asked other webmail companies to provide similar assistance, and that they simply haven't told us yet. Maybe you would be wise, if you care about your privacy, to use an alternative service that believes in you keeping your email communications private - such as ProtonMail, Posteo or Tutanota. Remember, if you use a free service for your email - your privacy is never going to be your email provider's highest priority. PS. Here is how you delete your Yahoo account. Source: Graham Cluley

You're welcome, Tony. I do not know what format the video is converted to. I'll ask Rod if he remembers.

My husband uses this with the VHS player to the computer, Tony. You can probably find one that is cheaper. Video Converter

Me either. Good to know. Thanks, Pete!

I've had that happen too. Amazon has very good customer service. Of course, I only order items that are fulfilled by Amazon.

Home renovations can turn up some strange things, but a family in the UK found something slightly more alarming than mold or a leaky roof. The Pipewell, England residents discovered a 3-foot-wide nest made by wasps that had taken up permanent residence in their attic, the BBC reports. According to the Northampton Chronicle & Echo, a property that had sat unoccupied for years was once home to some 10,000 wasp squatters. Undisturbed by human activity, the wasps constructed a massive sphere connected to the outside by a long, "intricate" tunnel. The discovery was made by exterminators who had been called in to treat a woodworm infestation and subsequently discovered a much bigger issue when the homeowner asked them to have a look at the massive orb in the attic. While not quite world record material—that honor belongs to a New Zealand nest found in 1963 measuring 12 feet long and 5 feet in diameter—it was still enough to cause a temporary case of buyer’s remorse. Gary Wilkinson, who owns the pest control business Pest Professionals, told the Chronicle that the nest was an impressive feat of insect engineering. “Although you wouldn't want it in your own loft, you have to say it's a very impressive and in its own way a very beautiful thing,” he said. [h/t BBC]

I agree. I always write reviews for products that I've purchased, good and bad.

Amazon detests fake reviews. In October 2015, it sued over 1,000 people over them. More recently, in June, it cracked down on a bunch of companies that it said paid people to produce reviews. Amazon undercover investigators have found that those paid product pushers don’t necessarily bother to even write the reviews themselves: they expect the companies to supply them with whatever fluff they want to stuff into the bogus reviews. To sneak past Amazon’s “Verified Purchaser” system, which tries to ensure that reviewers actually bought the product, dishonest reviewers even arranged shipment of empty boxes. In fact, in June 2015, Amazon introduced a new artificial intelligence system it developed in-house to weed out fake reviews. Here’s the latest salvo: on Monday, the company moved to stamp out a practice that might introduce, shall we say, a predisposition in reviewers to pump up their review wattage. Namely, the behemoth online retailer-of-everything-under-the-sun has banned the practice of giving freebie products in exchange for a review: what’s called “incentivized” reviews. It seems like common sense, but a recent study of more than 7 million reviews by analysis site ReviewMeta confirmed that customers who receive free or discounted items are indeed much more likely to write positive reviews. We found that reviews containing language that would indicate the reviewer received the item for free or at a discount in exchange for a review (incentivized reviews) on average rate the product .38 stars higher than reviews that did not contain this disclosure (non-incentivized reviews). So say bye-bye to the freebies. From Amazon’s post: …but why leave this reviewer selection up to vendors, when Amazon actually has its own program to handpick trusted and helpful reviewers to post opinions about new and pre-release products? That program is called Amazon Vine. Amazon launched Vine several years ago and says that it doesn’t involve incentivizing positive star ratings. Amazon doesn’t attempt to influence the content of reviews at all, it says, and doesn’t even require that a review be written. As well, Amazon limits the total number of Vine reviews that it displays for each product. Amazon says stay tuned: it’s got more refinements for Vine in the works. It’s already working well, though, Amazon says, meaning that new products are getting the attention they can’t get by having a store of reviews to rely on: Vine has important controls in place and has proven to be especially valuable for getting early reviews on new products that have not yet been able to generate enough sales to have significant numbers of organic reviews. We also have ideas for how to continue to make Vine an even more useful program going forward. Details on that as we have them. Amazon’s updated its community guidelines to reflect the ban on incentivized reviews. From the new guidelines: Source: Sophos

I'm pretty sure that I saw that link too. You have/had the same troublesome member we did.

Hi Donna, Fancy meeting you here! :big_grin: Welcome to PC Help Forums.

Hello plodr and Welcome to PC Help Forums.

A woman brought a very limp duck into a veterinary surgeon. As she laid her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird's chest. After a moment or two, the vet shook his head and sadly said, "I'm sorry, your duck, Cuddles, has passed away." The distressed woman wailed, "Are you sure?" "Yes, I am sure. Your duck is dead," replied the vet.. "How can you be so sure?" she protested. "I mean you haven't done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something." The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room. He returned a few minutes later with a black Labrador Retriever. As the duck's owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked up at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head. The vet patted the dog on the head and took it out of the room. A few minutes later he returned with a cat. The cat jumped on the table and also delicately sniffed the bird from head to foot. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room. The vet looked at the woman and said, "I'm sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead duck." The vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman.. The duck's owner, still in shock, took the bill. "$150!" she cried, "$150 just to tell me my duck is dead!" The vet shrugged, "I'm sorry. If you had just taken my word for it, the bill would have been $20, but with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan, it's now $150."

I've had this Hotmail account for ten years. I don't want to give it up. I have never cared for the gmail user interface.

The text is gray now instead of black. There used to be a box next to every email in the inbox so that you could check it off for deletion. Now you have to hover over everything with your mouse in order for it to appear. That includes the ribbon with New, Delete, Archive, Junk, Move to etc.

I cannot stand the new Outlook.com. Does anyone else care for it? I may have to switch back to Yahoo.

16. Click the "Select your app" button at the top of the pop-up window. 17. Scroll down to an app that you use, and click Generate. 18. If one of your regular apps is not listed, scroll all the way down to "Other app." Type in the name of that app -- for example, Galaxy S7 Email -- in the "Enter custom name" field, and click Generate. 19. You'll see a text string of 16 lowercase letters. Keep this window open. 20. Open the corresponding app on your mobile device and find the Settings menu. 21. Find the setting that corresponds to Yahoo account access. 22. Find the server settings and look for Incoming and Outgoing settings. 23. Click either Incoming Settings or Outgoing Settings and find the form-field into which you input your Yahoo password. 24. Type in the 16-letter password you generated on the Yahoo website. For email apps, you will need to do this for both Incoming and Outgoing settings. 25. Save your changes and see whether you can still access Yahoo from that app. If not, run through steps 12 through 15 again. 26. For each app that accesses your Yahoo account on each mobile device you own, you will need to repeat steps 9 through 15 individually. 27. Good luck. Source: Yahoo

If you're a Yahoo user, you already know that 500 million Yahoo accounts were compromised by malicious hackers, and that you should reset your Yahoo password. What Yahoo didn't tell you was that you may also need to unlink, and then relink, all the mobile devices that access your Yahoo account. That's because if you check your Yahoo email or Yahoo calendar on a tablet or smartphone, that mobile device is permanently logged into your Yahoo account with a unique password that's different from your regular password. As Dustin Childs and Simon Zuckerbraun of Trend Micro pointed out in a recent blog post, even if you've reset your regular password, malicious hackers may have already give their own mobile devices permanent access to your account. How to Reset All Your Yahoo Passwords 1. Sign into your Yahoo account in a web browser on a desktop or laptop computer. 2. Click the gear icon on the far right of the menu bar and select Account Info. 3. Click Account Security in the left navigation bar. 4. Click Change Password. 5. Type in your new password twice and click Continue. If you haven't already set up two-step verification, do it now. 6. Toggle the switch next to Two-Step Verification on the Account Security page. 7. Enter your mobile number in the pop-up window. 8. Select Send SMS or Call Me. 9. Follow the instructions on the text message or call you receive from Yahoo on your mobile phone. That takes care of your regular Yahoo password. Now you'll need to check to see if any unauthorized devices have access to your Yahoo account. 10. Click Recent Activity in the left navigation bar. 11. Look over "Apps connected to your account" for any devices, apps or locations that you don't recognize. 12. If there's anything unfamiliar, click Remove next to its listing. Now you have to decide whether to remove what you DO recognize, and then authorize those apps again. If you use your Yahoo account only to receive junk mail, you might not need to do this. But if you've already seen or removed an unfamiliar device from your account, then you should reset all your mobile accounts. You also should do this if you use Yahoo as your primary email provider, or if you use it to receive email from banks, credit-card providers or other financial institutions with which you have accounts. Here's how to proceed: 13. Click Remove next to one of your legitimate devices. 14. In the pop-up that appears, click the trash-can icon next to each listed mobile app. 15. Make sure to keep the pop-up window upon. You'll need to generate new per-app passwords for each app. Source: Yahoo

Would you jailbreak your iPhone if you could, and if it were easy to do? Would you pay a bit extra for a second-hand device that had been jailbroken for you? Jailbreaking is where you exploit bugs in Apple’s software to remove the restrictions imposed on your device by the operating system itself. Jailbreaking liberates your iPhone from Apple’s “walled garden,” by which you are forced to shop at the App Store only. That frees you up to run a whole range of apps that you can’t get via the official App Store, including apps with features that Apple won’t allow in the App Store at all. Ironically, one example of a prohibited feature that requires a jailbroken iPhone is checking for a jailbroken iPhone. That may sound like a pointless feature. If your phone isn’t jailbroken, why check if it is? The obvious answer, of course, is, “Why not?” If you’re a concerned user, or a sysadmin who’s serious about business security, you might want to keep an eye open for security anomalies – such as someone else sneakily jailbreaking your iPhone for nefarious reasons such as stealing data or installing malware. Of course, jailbreaking also makes it much easier to install and use stolen, illegal or pirated content, including apps, music, videos and so on. That doesn’t, ipso facto, make jailbreaking bad, which is why we’ve often voiced suggestions like this one: [Although jailbreaking brings a security risk,] we nevertheless wish that Apple would come to the jailbreaking party, even though we’d continue to recommend that you avoid untrusted, off-market apps. We suspect that Apple would benefit both the community and itself by offering an official route to jailbreaking – a route which could form the basis of independent invention and innovation in iDevice security by an interested minority. For now, however, jailbreaking remains a controversial issue – especially, it seems, in Japan. Reports from Toyama, a city in the central part of Japan, say that a 24-year-old man named Daisuke Ikeda was recently arrested for selling five pre-jailbroken iPhones online. Apparently, the phones also included a hacked version of Monster Strike, an online game that’s popular in Japan. The alternative version of the game supposedly gave players greater powers in the game than they’d have if they were using the official version. Racking up gameplay points or accessing powerful characters without earning or paying for them is unlikely to earn you many friends amongst players who have built up prestige in the game the hard way… …and, in Japan, it seems it can land you in trouble with the police too. According to the Japan Times, Ikeda had sold 200 iPhones before his arrest, “raking in an estimated ¥5,000,000 [about $50k] in sales.” (Of course, that wasn’t his profit: there’s no suggestion that the phones were unlawfully acquired, so you have to subtract Ikeda’s purchase price from his average selling price of $250 per phone.) What’s not clear from this case is the attitude of the authorities in Japan to jailbreaking in general. If you decide to jailbreak your own phone, purchased outright in locked-down form – for example to run ported Unix utilities that would otherwise be blocked, or to install additional security features that Apple doesn’t provide – is that OK? Afterwards, can you sell it on, or do you have to restore it with locked-down Apple firmware first? What if it was a model that Apple no longer supported, so there wasn’t any recent firmware to restore? One thing is certain: trying to regulate jailbreaking raises as many questions as it answers. Source: Sophos