The Computer Thread

Unsolicited job offers over email are either scams, or shady companies where you get recruited for morally gray or even illegal work, like dating site scammers and scam phone centers.

Doesn't that depend? I know some job search sites let employers reach out to you instead.

Yeah, but you sign up for those, so they are not unsolicited, and good job sites send an email for those employers so it is clear who the mail is from.

Always check job offers - I had one from a company that was in Linkedin that didn't have many connections and was hard to find on Google. I accepted the offer only to be told to contact the "recruiter" via Facebook Messager and then was emailed a "check" I was supposed to deposit for "expenses". I blocked the contact after I saw that the check was written in the name of some obscure company in another state and from a bank I'd never heard of. The scam relies on victims depositing fake checks and wiring money to scam accounts. I noped away from that as fast as I could.

That's what happened to me too. Thankfully, I never got caught up in that type of scam ever again.

Current rig of mine is an HP Victus Running a Ryzen CPU and Nvidia GPU - OS is Windows 11. For what it's worth, here's what I do when browsing the web - YMMV:

• My daily web browser is Waterfox - waterfox.net and on it I run NoScript and Ublock Orgin for any websites I'm just browsing. For sites like Tv Tropes I allow scrips and ads, but for most of the web I'm blocking things and choosing what I want to run.

• My default browser is Firefox (us link) so if I click on links or download a document with links, it goes to Firefox - that has NoScript and Ublock Orgin running on it.

• Microsoft Edge runs on the handful of sites I trust - my Gmail, my bank, my landlord's pay portal, Amazon, the local utility's pay portal etc. By "trust" I mean I know these websites and can trust them with my personal info and my bank info. When I'm not on those sites, Edge is off.

Why three browsers? Waterfox doesn't have my personal information, just my "for fun" YT, Gmail, Facebook and Tv Tropes information. Any haxor out there won't get my information if they send me malware and hack Waterfox. To their credit, Microsoft Defender DID catch a site's tracking cookies and script in Waterfox's cache - but since my very personal information is on another browser, any hacker didn't get what they wanted.

I just love Waterfox's UI -it brings more classic Firefox to Firefox, with work you can customize it and again my personal data isn't on it so whatever tracking it does have doesn't capture the "real me".

Firefox is there for sites I'm suspicious about and or those "spicy" websites (hey I have needs okay). It's set to clear cache and cookies when it closes.

Edge exists so that Microsoft can hoover up tracking data and report it back to House Redmond - but for running Amazon, my bank website etc will all the site scripts complete, nothing can beat it. It's a better Chrome than Chrome.

YMMV - some people only run one browser, others may not like Firefox or it's forks. This setup works for me.

Feel free to Switch out Chrome or Safari for Edge based on what OS you are running.

Edited by TairaMai on Jun 4th 2023 at 7:16:53 AM

I found a Peanuts comic from 1981 that revolves about drawing the @ symbol. And now I have to wonder what people were using that for all the way back in 1981.

Wow, it seems a lot older than I'd thought. Here is the oldest sample from 1345:

Yes, that is real. Yes, that is someone writing "@men" (in Bulgarian). No, we don't know why.

Edited by Redmess on Jun 4th 2023 at 11:55:59 AM

It has a long and interesting history:

"Before the symbol became a standard key on typewriter keyboards in the 1880s and a standard on QWERTY keyboards in the 1940s, the @ sign had a long if somewhat sketchy history of use throughout the world. Linguists are divided as to when the symbol first appeared. Some argue that the symbol dates back to the 6th or 7th centuries when Latin scribes adapted the symbol from the Latin word ad, meaning at, to or toward. The scribes, in an attempt to simplify the amount of pen strokes they were using, created the ligature (combination of two or more letters) by exaggerating the upstroke of the letter “d” and curving it to the left over the “a.”

Other linguists will argue that the @ sign is a more recent development, appearing sometime in the 18th century as a symbol used in commerce to indicate price per unit, as in 2 chickens @ 10 pence. While these theories are largely speculative, in 2000 Giorgio Stabile, a professor of the history of science at La Sapienza University in Italy, discovered some original 14th-century documents clearly marked with the @ sign to indicate a measure of quantity – the amphora, meaning jar. The amphora was a standard-sized terra cotta vessel used to carry wine and grain among merchants, and, according to Stabile, the use of the @ symbol ( the upper-case “A” embellished in the typical Florentine script) in trade led to its contemporary meaning of “at the price of.”

The more you know.

Huh. So it's basically shorthand for the word "per", just like "&" is shorthand for "and"?

Pretty much, it seems.

Hey guys. Looking for some technical help. Just got an Acer laptop back from the shop after some repair work. It had the hard drive saved but it has a new laptop shell,(don't remember the technical term but basically my hard drive was saved and put in a new but less damaged laptop around it). But I'm having problems playing steam games after the transition. I can play any other game but the ones on steam just don't seem to open and neither does Steam itself. Is it due to the repair work and does anybody know a fix? Thank you.

Edited by Wildcard on Jun 10th 2023 at 12:29:57 PM

It sounds like you might need to reinstall some drivers

You should just be able to reinstall steam? If you move the games folder somewhere else, you can point steam to it afterwards and it'll be fine.

Uninstaller Steam and all the games then reinstall it in a different games folder? Alrighty, that will take a bit but it is worth a shot.

You don't need to uninstall the games, just Steam. If the games still act up, you can run a data integrity check on them from Steam itself. If that doesn't help either, just uninstall and reinstall from Steam (that won't delete your save data).

Thank you. I will try that today.

It just worked after I used the taskbar to close steam then opened as administrator. Thank you everyone, it just had problem when it was open I guess.

I'm not sure if this is the right thread for this question or not, because it's a phone security question but it also is email-related so I figure it can't hurt to ask it here.

Short (necessary?) backstory: I have an old iPhone, got the update that introduces the Privacy Protection feature for the Mail app. I chose to leave it off when I initially updated because I wasn't sure what was the better choice in the long run, but recently I noticed it's suddenly on (probably I was prompted to turn it on again and in a tired haze said yes).

So, my question/concern: I understand the concept of the feature (loading emails and images on proxy servers to hide your IP), but, well... I have an anxiety disorder and recently started wondering what this means for the junk folder, since this presumably means the senders of emails know the email was opened even if they don't know by who. Normally, I don't check my junk mail often unless I'm waiting on an email that hasn't arrived, but does this feature pre-load junk emails and if so, is there any sort of risk? And if there is, how do I turn it off?

I'm mostly concerned because I noticed I've been getting a lot more spam emails again, and while they could be unrelated, I want to be able to put my mind at ease.

Senders don't know if emails have been viewed, that's not how email works.

You can make emails that tell you when there read, but its a specialty feature used mostly for business...

Emails don't load until you open them though, not sure why a proxy would change that.

The spam email though is just a general trend right now like... across every thing... let me have a guess here.

Or is it perhaps one of the countless fake invoice scams?

Either way those get your information from whenever you sign up for any thing, they sell your information to other companies to people who also sell the information and so on.

There is no way to avoid them short of having no online presence, and nothing really makes them more ore less common that you really have any control over.

Unless you want to have one email for work and personal contact... and one for signing up for things, that's what I do.

Edited by Imca on Jun 11th 2023 at 9:01:02 AM

Ha, I haven't gotten the Netflix one as an email, but as a text? Definitely. A lot of them don't even try to look official.

To clarify a bit more, the Privacy Protection feature pre-loads emails before they're opened. Prior to it being switched on, when I opened an email I had the option to manually load all images or leave them unloaded, but now they're already loaded. If that's not actually a concern then I won't worry about it.

A separate email might be a good idea, though I'm also considering an alias as was suggested to me last time I asked about spam (this is such an old email that moving important stuff over would be a pain).

It bugs me that avif uptake is so slow and lacklustre. I could set up any screenshots I take to automatically be encoded that way, but absolutely nowhere would display it, which makes it a completely pointless endeavour (the images are also for some reason encoding upside down, and I have no idea why; since it's a very niche thing, no chance that's being fixed any time soon). Why does this matter? Well, I've been sorting out my screenshot process recently.

Take a screenshot in a game at 4k, it becomes something like an 11mb blob if dragged directly to the clipboard. Paste that into, e.g. discord, and it takes a while to process into an actual image and is an 11mb image.

Have it automatically saved as a jpeg first and copy that to a clipboard (since you don't want to paste its contents into an image editor in this case), it's only about 1mb (better than png for things like this, tbf).

Have it compressed from into a webp file at default quality, it still looks about the same, and it's a 500kb file.

Now, run that initial jpeg through an encoder to get an avif file? About 150kb. Still looked the same, aside from the inexplicable upside-down thing.

That's a massive saving in bandwidth needed to host images! And quicker upload times. And, unlike the whole "I can compress a 1080p episode of anime into 200mb without quality loss" thing that takes six hours for AV 1, it doesn't really take longer than other image compression methods on a computer (again, it's just running through a simple command-line utility that gets e.g. baked into gimp anyway). Faster loading. Faster uploading. But it's just a standard that's not really implemented yet... <_>

Ha, I haven't gotten the Netflix one as an email, but as a text? Definitely. A lot of them don't even try to look official.

Not looking official is actually a technique scammers use. By having weird fonts or spelling/grammar errors, they filter out people who are too smart to ever fall for the scam, only catching the people who are dumb enough that they would go through the whole process of giving the scammers money.

there is no difference between smart people and dumb when it comes to scams,it's all a matter of opptunity and chance,a smart person can very well fall for a scam but 'dumb' person will never check their inbox

Another Louis Rossman video - tl;dr: A man says that Amazon suspended his account because a delivery driver thought he heard "racist messages" from a Ring camera. Amazon suspension of the man's account turned off his Ring, Alexa and other Amazon devices. Amazon then re-instated his account but the man is pissed. Rossman takes the time to insist that people shouldn't have devices that connect to someone else's servers.