Category Archives: Computers

So much for online privacy….

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Earlier this week, I was reading an article about Trip Advisor, which has been one of my go-to sites for travel info (“What’s wrong at Tripadvisor?“). I’ve contributed dozens of reviews over the years, so have had an investment in the site.

It seems Tripadvisor has been in a slump for a while, with its stock price plummeting from $110 per share down below $30.

When Expedia spun it out in 2011, Tripadvisor was the undisputed king of hotel reviews and research with great reach in organic search — that is, until Google Travel tilted consumer traffic in its own direction and competitors such as Booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb closed the gap.

Can I confess that I’ve never run into Google Travel before? Booking.com and Expedia, yes, but Google Travel, nope.

So I thought that I would take a look, and headed off to www.google.com/travel/.

And that was a shock!

At the top of the page are two large graphics, portraying the trip we are on now, and another planned future trip. Both include a link to “View Details”.

And that brought another surprise. Google displayed our United Airlines flights complete with confirmation code, and our hotel with complete reservation confirmation info.

And that wasn’t the end. Scroll down a bit and there was a nicely illustrated list of each of our past trips going back five years to February 2015. As in the case of future trips, most of the past trips include flight, hotel, and rental car details.

There is a note in small print near the top of the first page: “Only you can see this.” You know, I don’t think that’s very comforting.

Click on a link for further information, and you learn something else from Google: “Your trips are created from confirmation emails sent to your Gmail or your recent activity.”

Hmmmmmm. That’s a lot more mucking around in my Gmail than I was aware Google has been doing. I’m pretty open about such things, and tend not to get paranoid about privacy issues. But this demonstration of how intrusive they can be does give me pause.

Yes, I thought I had been hacked

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If you tried to visit this site on Tuesday, you likely got an error message or a strange unrelated screen.

I discovered the problem when I tried up upload a new post. I couldn’t get through.

I contacted my hosting service, and after checking it out, they advised me that the DNS pointers had been changed and it was no longer connected to them. My first reaction–I thought I had been hacked, less than a day after posting about a certain presidential campaign.

Well, I did a bit more diagnosing of the problem, and it turned out to be much less dramatic than an outside hacker. Embarrassingly so, truth be told! Apparently I had not updated the credit card on file with the domain registrar and my domain had expired yesterday. The charge was rejected. Then, basically, the domain was repossessed for non-payment.

While embarrassing, that was good news. Much easier to fix than a full scale hack job.

So now, several hours later, it’s back online.

My apologies to all. Hopefully I’ll get that new post up in the morning.

Tracing the missing link

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[Note: Please consider this post, and the initial one a couple of days ago, to be rescinded. I was wrong. Well, mostly and essentially wrong. It’s a short story.

Sometimes when you “make A,” it’s possible to hide out for a while and, after a little time passes, assume that no one is going to notice. I don’t think this is one of those times.

Instead, I’m chowing down on a big serving of humble pie. And I’ve learned a lesson in “sometimes you can overthink these things.”

Case in point–my mystery of the linked reports (or my failure to find them).

I did, after feedback provided here, discover the problem. It wasn’t in the department’s documents, or in the capitol’s computer system and online retrieval. It was in my assumption of how it worked. And I see exactly how it happened.

So I started at the list of reports to the 2020 legislature. I clicked on the link marked “pdf.” And, on my laptop screen, was displayed the transmittal letter submitting the document to the members of the legislature.

And that letter contained an active link to the document.

It turns out that was my problem! Bear with me here. Seeing the active link in the letter, I clicked on it and, in most cases, I got an error message instead of the pdf document.

But…my face is red here…if I had scrolled down past the transmittal letter, it was followed by the document itself. I just never got there because I was following that link in the transmittal letter, which turns out to have been a red herring!

Had I been using a desktop computer with larger screen, this would probably have been apparent. But with my 13″ laptop, the transmittal letter and red herring of a link filed the screen and kept the document safely hidden from my view.

It obviously pains me to disclose my ineptness in this case, but it’s good to know the system isn’t deeply broken.]

Before reading further, see note above.

In a post here on Sunday regarding legislative documents available online through the capitol website (https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov), I mentioned that the link provided to a DLNR report was broken.

It didn’t take long before a response was received from Lawrence Agcaoili
of DLNR’s Information Technology Services Office.

… Not sure where you got the link for the report because the correct link below was sent to Speaker Saiki and Members of the Legislature:

a report from the Department of Land and Natural Resources, “Identification Of Rivers And Streams Worthy Of Protection.”

http://files.hawaii.gov/dlnr/reports-to-the-legislature/2020/CW20-River-and-Streams-Rpt-FY19.pdf

Please update your article. Thank You!

So I went back and repeated the steps taken while writing the original post. I’m using a MacBook Pro and the Safari browser.

First: Starting at the capitol website’s main page, and selected the link to “Reports and Lists.” There, under “Measure Introduction,” the last item is a link to “Reports to the Legislature.”

Once there, you can locate the streams report from DLNR, which appears as DC106. Then I clicked on the provided link to a pdf of the transmittal letter.

The transmittal letter appears to have an active link to the same URL provided by Agcaoili.

I just clicked the link…and got the “404 Not Found” error message. So I tried copying the link in the letter and pasting it into my browser. Again, it went directly to the error message.

Then I went back and repeated the sequence using Firefox. It led to the same error message.

However, if I use the direct link provided in Agcaoili’s reply, which appears to be identical, it works and opens the report.

So I need to apologize to DLNR. It does appear that their transmittal letter accompanying the report included the proper URL that should have led directly to the report. However, once it appeared on the capitol website, the link was broken.

Okay, one of the tech folks out there must have an explanation for why this is happening. Please chime in!

Identifying an email scam

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A couple of days ago, I received an email which appeared to be from a friend who lives just a few blocks away.

The subject line: “Need A Favor !!!”

A brief message followed:

Hi,

I hope you are well. I need quick assistance from you I’d appreciate it if you could email me back when you get this.

Thank you!

It didn’t take me too long to confirm my suspicion that it was a scam. I later learned that if you responded, the scammer, still posing as a friend, asked you to buy and send one or more Apple iTunes gift cards.

Here’s how I confirmed it was a scam.

I first looked at the sender’s email address, and checked it against prior emails from my friend. The address was correct.

But the message was strange. It didn’t greet me by name, and wasn’t signed. And I couldn’t see what sort of favor my friend would want that she wouldn’t be able to just ask for directly.

So I took one simple step.

Find and click on the little upside-down triangle next to the email address at the top of the email. That opens a window with additional information. I’ve blacked out my friend’s name and email, but you’ll get the idea.

At the top, it showed my friend’s correct email address at aol.com as the source of the email (From), which was repeated below on the line labeled “To”.

But in between was the key line, labeled “Reply-to”.

The address there was a slightly changed from my friend’s address, and it was a gmail address instead of the original aol.

The subtle change in the reply to address was something like this (I’ll use a dummy address as an example).

Correct address: yourfriend@aol.com

As shown in “Reply-to”: yourffriennd@gmail.com.

If you weren’t expecting anything, you might not notice the reply-to address was different from my friend’s actual email address.

But the subtle change showed replies would be going to a scammer who had set up that alternative email account.

So when things don’t look quite right, check closely. Protect yourself online.