The Royal Scam or just a CopyCat App?

Apologies to Steely Dan.

By now everyone has heard of Ello.

The question still remains why?

Someone posted about it shortly after I read Robert Scoble's post about it.Being a messaging and communication person, figured I should check it out.

I described it as a mix between Pinterest and Twitter. Many said it was like Facebook. It does not really matter because it doesn't do anything special, yet, that I can tell. Maybe Jerry Seinfeld is behind it. You know, it's an app, about nothing...get it?

The niche that it may provide something useful to is amusing. If you worry so much about privacy, stop using cell phones, cable tv, your car, credit cards, etc. If you care that much about how Facebook handles your details, and think this will make it more private, okay, have fun. Ideally, yes, nothing should be tracking us, but living in reality is another story.

What if I am wrong? What if it will boom like Twitter? Until you have more friends to search on here, the search sucks right now by the way, it is like a ghost town. You can discover people, but as one of my friends pointed out, "same ol' jokers--- hey guys :)".

Talk about being in a bubble!

Persistent chat room with graphics and not limited in syntax length....yeah so what?

If he was meaner, I would venture one of my friends on the west coast would have asked his programming class to build something to set up the world for such a scam.

So why blog about it, because sometimes life is about failures and what we learn from them.

And yes I have invites still if you really need it.

When Microsoft Fake Support Calls

A few months back I posted this about a consulting company that called me about a virus on my pc that called them.

Now my grandmother, at 91 years old, get this call and she manages to get their number and name from them, and the number works. Quite sure the name is just an alias, as how many people from India are called Steve Johnson I wonder? They claim they are from Windows Technical Department.

So naturally I wanted to have some fun and managed to get my IBM Sametime SUT call recorded using a 3rd party tool called SoundTap Streaming. Looks to be free for personal usage just not for commercial business.

So anyone else want to have fun, just call and say they left this number with yur sister/mom to call them back, the number is 210-888-9112.

The first call (you can listen to it) (the recording may sound like an echo but that goes away) was me calling and asking for Steve. After some brief discussions around which Windows machine and what this was about he led me to the event viewer and claimed all the "errors" were viruses. He would need me to be connected to their Certified Microsoft Support team and would call me back to fix it all. Which they did a few  minutes later.

The second call (you can listen to it) was to have logmein setup and let them into my pc. At this point I had to say hang on it says you can transfer files when I give you access. And they insisted that I could cut them off at any time and although I suggested they walk me through the process, they would not do it.
as you can see from the screenshot, it all is through logmein and looks correct.

It was at this point when the person on the line said I should let Jennifer (note their spelling) on by clicking OK and I asked if she was Jennifer and she said no, Jennifer was next to her.  After a few tries and my effort to redirect them, they hung up from me. That did not stop them from asking me to click OK as you can see how many times they tried. They ask you to ignore the warning about unsolicited calls, a nice touch they added or just a generic note from logmein, either way, it is impressive how tenacious they can be.

Please do yourselves a favor, let your non-IT friends and relatives, especially older ones, realize that just like the dishwasher repair people do not randomly knock on your door or setup service calls, neither does any computer company you have not just called yourself.

EDIT: I was told that if they get inside your computer they then deny you access and hold the system ransom for $250 to unlock it again. aside from probably stealing any financial files and leaving code on your pc.