Facebook & SCAM ads

[TonyPSchaefer]

Originally Posted by qbee42

PM me with the following information:

1) Full legal name.
2) Birth date.
3) Social Security Number.
4) Drivers License state and number.
5) All bank account information including PINs.
6) Mother's maiden name.
7) Your place of birth.
8) Name of your first dog.
9) Name of your first pet goldfish.
10) Dental records.

Oddly, many of these have the same answer.

[jayman]

Now *that* is frightening!

[hyo silver]

What's the answer? "Ida No"?

[qbee42]

Originally Posted by hyo silver

What's the answer? "Ida No"?

Why does Tony have round shoulders and a flat forehead?

Ask him a question and he shrugs his shoulders.

Tell him the answer and he slaps his forehead.

Tom

[hyo silver]

A friend once told me of a woman I should meet, named Ida May. After several thoughts, I asked if she had a sister named 'Item B'.

Well, it was funny at the time.

[daniel]

Originally Posted by moxiequz

They're both social networking sites but they've very much different beasties. Frankly Daniel I have a hard time picturing you as the "myspace" type. Most myspace pages I see make my brain hurt. It's like a deliberate assault on good taste.

I like Facebook for the most part. They used to have a very nice, simple, clean interface but as with all good things they didn't know enough to leave it alone. I still use Facebook regularly though and even now it's much more elegant than myspace.

It's a good way to get/keep in touch with people you know that aren't near you geographically such as friends from high school and college, people you meet while traveling, and of course fellow Prius Chatters.

Well, I guess I'm not really the myspace type, because I signed up in order to see what it was all about, and then could not figure out what to do with it other than post non-confidential information about myself. (Single male, likes cats, etc., etc.)

Maybe the problem is that I don't have any friends who use those sorts of sites. Nobody from my school days would want to be in touch with me, my friends back in Fargo use email but not those "networking" sites. And I don't want to spend more time than I already do at the computer, just to be able to browse friends' pages to see what they're up to. As for sharing photos, there's already a thousand photo sites.

So the end result is that I have not logged on since I first signed up for a page. And on the assumption that they would email me if someone was trying to "befriend" me, nobody is, other than all the spam I'm getting at that email address.

I saw "Hard Candy" a while back. Teenage girl and 40-ish man meet on a "social networking" site. Where it goes from there is unexpected. Ellen Page is a very good actor.

[markderail]

It's real easy to create fake scam websites.

I just thought Facebook would look into paid, user-created ads, before publishing them.

It's like if a scam Ad appeared on CNN that did illegal phishing, CNN would *have* to blush, no?

[daniel]

I always turn on the TV in the hotel room when I travel. I don't know why. It's kind of a morbid fascination. Television is filled with scam ads: Products that you know don't work and diet pills that destroy your health and candy marketed to kids as breakfast cereal, etc., etc. TV stations are big, profitable, "respectable" (in the capitalist use of the term) companies. Why would the internet be any better? There are fewer controls on the internet, so you gotta expect it to be even worse, though the only way you can get any worse than TV ads is by stealing peoples' identity or hijacking their computers.

Google published a paper about internet advertising that draws people in to malicious web sites. Kind of dry, but very interesting material. Ad servers sell space to each other so your browser may be redirected multiple times before it fetches an ad, which may be just an ad, or may be a routine that tries to install malware onto your computer. Bottom line: install an ad blocker and never click on an ad that gets through, whether it be on Facebook, CNN, or anywhere else.

[jayman]

The nice thing about running Ubuntu with the modified Firefox browser, and the optional NoScript, is that sort of redirect never happens