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Volume 3, Issue 5 - May, 2008 - © 2009 by Moose Logic, All Rights Reserved
Cover Story: Looking For A New House Or Apartment But Don’t Want To Get A Realtor Involved Quite Yet?
Check Out Google’s Free Real Estate Search!
Do You Roll Out The Red Carpet For Identity Thieves?
Rebate Alert: Don’t Get Ripped Off
Vow Of Silence?
But I Didn’t Send Them Anything! (Did I?)
Moose Logic Coming Events
(Moose Views is a monthly newsletter prepared by Moose Logic to bring you information and tips on maintaining a trouble-free network)
Looking For A New House Or Apartment But Don’t Want To Get A Realtor Involved Quite Yet? Check Out Google’s Free Real Estate Search!
Looking for a new house or apartment can sometimes be a daunting task. Finding a realtor, narrowing down the abundant amount of properties for sale in today’s market, and investigating the surrounding neighborhoods can take a lot of time and energy that none of us seem to have anymore.To make things even more frustrating, until now there’s been no central place to sort through all the property listings for sale. Going to a specific realtor’s web site usually shows only the properties they have listed for sale and not all of the available properties in the area.
Enter Google, the king of searching the web, that now offers you a way to search for real estate and get a ton of other convenient data right at your fingertips during your search. A Google real estate search will show you on a live Google map the location of the property, the surrounding community, and with a few simple clicks you can add important features you’d like to see like schools, major roads, and even pizza places.
To
get started point your web browser to
www.google.com and then click on Maps. Then click on My Maps. In the
box below it will list Featured Searches. Put a check mark in the “Google Real Estate Search” box. A new dialog
box will open asking you to put in common search parameters like location, price range, number of bath and
bedrooms and any keywords like “cul de sac” or “horse property.”
Once you conduct a search you’ll be given the results of your search on the left hand side and an interactive map on the right. You can click on any property listed on the left hand column and Google will map the property. Clicking on the listing will take you directly to the listing realtor’s website. Best of all these searches will include data from all available realtors and sources instead of just one or two specific realtors. In some cases Google will even search public records for properties in foreclosure, etc.
Click on a property you’re interested in and Google will draw it on an interactive map. A balloon showing the pertinent facts will be displayed too. Look closely and near the bottom of the balloon there will be a clickable link that says Search Nearby. Click on this link and you can type in Grade Schools, Pizza Places, Health Clubs or anything else that you’d like to find out and Google will re-draw the map and show you the location of the other things you’re interested in.
Do You Roll Out The Red Carpet For Identity Thieves?
Just about every web site you visit these days wants you to register and choose a password, especially when
making a purchase.
However, if you do this carelessly, you may be setting yourself up as easy prey for online criminals.
Although we know we should choose unique and hard to decipher passwords that contain both numbers and letters, most people still use easy to remember passwords and words for their convenience. And to make matters worse, we use the same passwords on multiple sites.
Below are the top 10 passwords used online according to PC Magazine. If you are using any of the following, you’re putting a big red bullseye on your account for identity theft:
- password
- 123456
- qwerty
- abc123
- letmein
- monkey
- myspace1
- password1
- link182
- [your first name]
I read of one case where a user was sitting in front of his home PC when suddenly the mouse started moving around the screen on its own. No, his PC wasn’t haunted, but it was possessed...by someone who now had his GoToMyPC credentials, because he had accessed his home PC from a PC at a copy center—on which someone had installed a “key logger” program. The same thing could happen if you use one of these public machines to remotely access your company network, or to get to Outlook Web Access.
If you’re using BioPassword to secure your corporate network, you’re still OK—because even though they have your username and password, they won’t be able to mimic your typing rhythm. But if you’re not, you could be in trouble.
If you want a personal password management program, RoboForm is a great FREE utility you can download without having to fear adware or spyware.
After you download the software, it memorizes your passwords and logs you in automatically to every web page with one click. Since it bypasses the keyboard, keyloggers won’t see the password.
Best of all, it encrypts your passwords and generates random passwords that hackers cannot guess. You can even back up your passwords so you can copy them to another computer. And if you travel a lot, consider RoboForm2Go, which will store your encrypted passwords on a USB memory stick that you can take with you and use if you’re stuck using a publicly accessible PC.
RoboForm has received PC Magazine’s Editor's Choice award, and CNET Download.com's Software of the Year award.
To get a copy, visit RoboForm.
Rebate Alert: Don’t Get Ripped Off
The offers are irresistible but misleading; retailers advertise after-rebate prices on hardware and software to grab your attention and get you to buy. But are you really getting the bargain you expected?They’re Counting On You To Forget
According to the NPD Group, a global market research firm, almost one-third of all computer products and twenty percent of all consumer electronics are sold with a rebate. Manufacturers use rebates as an easy way to offer discounts without actually having to take the full financial hit; that’s because thirty to fifty percent of the buyers never attempt to redeem them and therefore end up paying full price for the merchandise.
Get Ready To Jump Through Multiple Hoops
To further tip the scales in their favor of not having to pay out, some manufacturers and retailers are imposing impossible restrictions, complicating the process to request a rebate, delaying payments, and creating other barriers that make it difficult to get your money. All of these are delay tactics to get you to give up on the idea of getting your rebate out of frustration.
New Laws Protect You
With consumer complaints to the FTC and Better Business Bureau piling up, regulators have tightened the rules around advertising rebates.
Last year, the Federal Trade Commission settled its first dispute with a Dallas-based CompUSA store for knowingly advertising rebates from computer peripherals manufacturer Qps Inc., even though they knew this manufacturer wasn’t fulfilling on the rebates advertised.
After this settlement, CompUSA was not only required to advertise the time frame for securing the rebates advertised, but also had to take financial responsibility for any rebates not paid during the promised time frame.
Event though the government is on your side, getting stuck in the middle of a rebate war is very frustrating and a huge waste of time. If you are going to try to cash in on a rebate, here are some tips that will help.
5 Tips To Collecting Your Promised Rebate
- Follow the rebate instructions carefully. Many manufacturers will reject a rebate over a tiny technicality. That means reading the small print and following the instructions to the letter.
- Make a copy of all the paperwork, receipts, and documents before mailing them off. Some manufacturers may request the original receipt; if you mail in your only copy, you could be out of luck if it gets “lost” in the mail. Which brings me to tip #3...
- Mail your rebate via certified mail to have proof of delivery.
- Schedule a reminder to yourself to call the company if your rebate doesn’t show up within the time frame promised. Most companies will have a web site or toll-free number to call to track your rebate.
- If the manufacturer rejects your rebate or is holding your check, let them know you plan on contacting the FTC or the BBB. Ask the people you speak to for their names and ask to speak to their supervisor.
Vow Of Silence?
Once upon a time there was a man who grew weary of his life and his job and the world in general. He needed a fresh start so he joined a monastery, where he chose to take a vow of silence. Every 10 years though, he would be allowed to speak only two words.The first 10 long and silent years passed for the man. Then the elders at the monastery brought him into their council room and asked him for his two words.
“Cold room,” said the man. The elders nodded and dismissed the man. Ten more long years passed and again the elders summoned the man to speak his two words. This time he said, “terrible food.” Again the elders nodded and dismissed the man.
Another long 10 years passed and the man stood once again in front of the elders in the council room. His two words?
“I quit!”
“The elders looked at each other for a moment and then the head elder replied, “That doesn’t surprise us one bit. All you’ve done for the last 30 years is complain!”
“But I Didn’t Send Them Anything! (Did I?)”
It’s extremely annoying to get undeliverable email messages bouncing back to you when you know darned well you didn’t send anything to the email address that’s in the non-delivery notification. We frequently get requests from our clients to fix this “problem.”Unfortunately, unless your computer is infected by a virus or worm—and the odds of that are pretty small if your anti-virus software is up to date—the “problem” isn’t anything that can be fixed on your systems.
One of the most insidious tricks that spammers use is to harvest email addresses and use them as spoofed “from” addresses on the messages they send out. They get them from Web sites. They get them from mailing lists that you may have signed up for. There’s also a good chance that anyone that you’ve ever sent email to has your email address cached somewhere in their computer—so if they get infected with a virus or worm, your email address may be harvested along with the addresses of everyone else who has corresponded with that person.
When those spam messages are sent out—by the hundreds of thousands—some of the addresses they’re sent to will be no good. And in many of those cases, a non-delivery notification will be sent to the email address that the message appears to be from. And if your email address was chosen as the spoofed “from” address, that means the non-delivery notification will come to you.
If you’re on our MooseGuardTM spam and virus filtering service, most of the spam bounce-backs should be caught by the filter...but some will get through. We get (and hate) them too.
Perhaps someday the industry will agree on a standard way to validate the sender’s email address and ignore messages that don’t check out. Until then, feel free to join us in hoping the spammers enjoy a one-way trip to the theological abode of eternal punishment!
