Techy odds and ends

First of all, let's get one thing out of the way. It's a major thing that you always need to bear in mind when participating in social media in order to enjoy it safely. Your own safety is not the only thing that depends on this, that of your friends and family does, too. Social media is not a safe haven. There. I said it. Social media is open to anyone, not just the "good guys" like you and your friends. The "bad guys" are also out there and they gradually glean snippets of information from you and others that help them build up a profile allowing them to impersonate you, take over your social media account or even perpetrate identity theft. Any of the above can ruin your reputation and your credit rating and get you into trouble with the law if a crime is committed using your identity. That is, unless you deprive the bad guys of this information... Don't even feed them misinformation either because they can detect patterns in tha...

We've all seen those status updates from friends stating that they got 9 out of 10 answers right to a so-called impossible test claiming that " Nobody will get more than 60% of these right!" or something similar, haven't we? Let's look at how these things work, what they do and why they do it. Before going any further, help yourself to a decent dollop of cynicism or you're going to be very disappointed in social media. Remember the golden rule: if it looks too good to be true, then the chances are that it is not true. If there is the remotest possibility that something happening on social media could be something other than what it looks like, then it is not what it looks like and someone is trying to pull a fast one for profit in some way. Are the people setting these quizzes doing it out of the goodness of their hearts for the enrichment of the human race? Of course not. They're doing it to make money . So how do they make their money? What is their...