We Did It! — Maybe? RDP Monday: PRINCE
I’m sorry. Didn’t use the “word of the day” because this needed to go out to everyone I could send it to. No matter how little you pay attention to what’s going on in your technical department, you should read this because it really does matter to you and all of us.
So, for the moment, Tyngpress.com is closed, but despite that everyone says “it was closed down,” they closed THEMSELVES down and were NOT forced to close. I got this note this morning from “Web.Informer.com”:
On Fri, 2 Aug at 11:28 PM , MARILYN ARMSTRONG <fivedawgz@gmail.com> wrote:
79011:414394
But the message on the actual website (Tygpress.com) was this:
Tygpress.com is temporarily out of service due to technical issues. will be back soon…
This is a literal paste-down, so the misspellings are (for once) not mine.
This comment does NOT indicate they were closed down but are obviously getting hit by a lot of complaints. Duh.
And this site is one of the thousands, maybe millions of such sites. They are all over the world. We have no control over them. This particular one actually had a platform on another server, but many of them have their own servers and work for governments who not only do not care about “us,” but are intentionally out to get us.
Be careful what you post, especially if you have any intention of publishing it. Do NOT publish original artwork if it is something you intend to sell or simply is very dear to you.
These pieces of scum are everywhere and they are targeting every single one of us. I’ve been hacked. Fandango has been hacked. I’m sure many more of us have been hacked. Some of us got off lightly, others had to pay for it. I was also locked out of my own computer, but I spent two full days UNlocking.
PLEASE BACK UP YOUR MATERIAL AND DO IT REGULARLY, EVEN THOUGH IT IS BORING.
MORE IS BETTER.
When you clean off your computer, you clean off EVERYTHING THAT WAS ON IT. You are effectively wiping your hard drive which is fine if your material was backed up onto at least TWO SEPARATE EXTERNAL DRIVES and the rest of it lives on external drives belonging to companies like Amazon and Dell and other major cloud providers.
Google is useless. They won’t do anything and we won’t even discuss Facebook.
WordPress is equally useless. You can enter into their “blocked” functions anything you like, but it doesn’t accomplish anything. They have no effective security arrangements.
No matter WHAT they say, they are lying.
They have also made it (by the way), nearly impossible to get material from new folders in graphics (photographs, in essence).
All you get now is a list. You can’t see any of the images in the folder.
For those of us that are serious photographers and artists, that means you have to carefully name each item in every new folder– or any older folder you haven’t yet opened.
This is going to require endless hours of additional work for everyone who uses a lot of graphics content. I haven’t even bothered to complain to them, though I suppose I should. From previous experience, when they’ve decided to do something exceptionally stupid, pointless, and counter-productive, they never go back and make it work the way it used to. But this is worse than usual. This is AWFUL.
I’m getting close to giving up. It’s not that I don’t love you all, but I’m paying for the privilege of being virtually completely hackable. I’m running some of the world’s worst software and being talked down to like an infant by the baby morons running their “technical” division — our glorious “happiness engineers.”
All they want is more money when they can’t even deliver what we are already paying for.
NOTE: Adjacent to the “select” section from which you need to pull up a picture, there’s a small icon (I can’t copy it, my snap-catch function won’t work on that screen), but if you click on it, it offers you some choices about how to see images. Anyone who recently got a Microsoft “upgrade” will probably have this problem. Select one of the images!
Categories: #FOWC, Blogging, Daily Prompt, Fandango's One Word Challenge, Hacking, Marilyn Armstrong, WordPress
technology is a mixed blessing!
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Very mixed.
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Sounds like you’re having a bad day, Marilyn.
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I’m just getting tired of the mess with security — the lack thereof. It used to be a few cute folks stealing a picture to use as a “screenshot.” Now, it’s entire websites stealing everything and anything because they can. And the spammer, scammer, hackers — they are a million years ahead of us in their ability to steal anything they want. We have nothing with which to fight them.
I’m tired. And defeated. So much of the fun is gone. I feel I have an obligation to make my voice heard in this insane world, but I often wonder why I bother? Since it is literally the least I can do, I will do it until maybe sanity returns and maybe then, I can give up. I really have been doing this too long.
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Don’t give up. You are too good and so many of us looking forward to your voice and your perspectives. I know it can be discouraging, but if you leave out of frustration, we all will have lost.
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I know. But, I get tired. and sometimes, I just stare at the screen and wonder what I can say that I haven’t said a dozen times in various ways. It gets demoralizing. So much of the fun has gone out of the experience. Now, it’s more like having an obligation and I need to push forward. I’ve got a few short vacations coming up during which I hope to NOT write at all. I urgently need a real break — not a partial one, but some time really OFF. I’ll see how it goes.
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You know the real irony? I CAN’T REMEMBER MY OWN USERNAMES AND PASSWORDS. How the hell do THEY figure them out? I can’t figure them out and I created them.
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I’ve come to accept and expect that nothing is private, if it is anywhere on the internet. I try not to use family photos and I am very conflicted about putting my poetry on my blog. The one poem that is there right now has already been published in an anthology of poetry, in print, in a book made with paper pages, but I’m still thinking about taking it down. Don’t get me started on labeling photos! Ugh! Good advice about backing up to an external hard drive.
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Use two, in case one fails! They are pretty cheap these days. You need to be able to access data without using your computer so if you are down — for whatever reason — you can still find your photographs or poetry or book chapters!
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Thanks, Marilyn! You are proof that there is intelligent life on Earth.
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Only occasionally. Mostly, I’m just one of the rabble.
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Has anyone dealt into the psyche of a hacker? What’s their motive?
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Some board, unemployed kid living in their parents basement I suspect Garry….motive may be just to throw a little chaos into people’s lives.
Leslie
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Or they are being paid by the Chinese or Russians.
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They are having a lot of their own problems Marilyn. Have had a look at the Dow Jones today? Wow.
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