Here are this week’s Life Pro Tips.
1. Before traveling anywhere, always download an offline map of the area. It will save you a ton of nerves in case the Wi-Fi is weak or you can’t buy local SIM on the airport or upfront.
Also, buying an e-sim card upfront is always the best option.
2. It’s ok to be selfish when it comes to your health right now. Be clear and stern when it comes to the boundaries you need to feel safe.
3. Always offer coffee to handymen who enter your house, you will get better, quicker service and fun conversations.
4. If you get an email saying someone has digital evidence of you watching pornography or having sex and will distribute it to all your contacts unless you pay them bitcoin, put that email right in your junk mail. It’s a scam.
An experience shared: ” I just got this email today and even knowing it seemed phishy, I couldn’t help but panic. The subject line included my username and a password that I have (stupidly) been using on various unimportant websites since I was a teenager. The email was long and written using those weird characters spam emails often use, but it was fairly well written grammatically.
Essentially, I was told that this person (or human equivalent of decades-old pond scum) had managed to gain access to my phone, had recorded me, and unless I paid it $1900 was going to send that recording to all of my contacts on messenger, Facebook, and email. It said I had a certain amount of time to pay up, and that even if I went to the police there was no way the email could be traced. It even went so far as to say there was a specific pixel in the email showing that I had read it.
Thankfully my boyfriend was with me and quick to notice it had to be a scam since I don’t even have Facebook. He was immediately able to find an article online to confirm that this “sextortion” scam has been going on for the past couple of years. The wording of my own little special delivery of an email was almost verbatim the wording of the email in the article.
As someone who has always considered myself fairly savvy in recognizing a scam, I have to say this one really got to me. Even knowing it’s a scam, I still can’t help but feel violated. No one wants to be confronted with the potential that there is some utter creep out there with compromising footage of their private lives, especially in a time when there’s no telling what hackers on the dark web are capable of. I just wanted to share in case anyone else happens to get a similar email. Don’t let them get under your skin, and definitely don’t send them any money. Unfortunately, there are a lot of slime-balls out there trying to scare money out of us. But the more we stick together and keep each other informed, hopefully we can minimize the number of people they take advantage of. “
5. Harvard University listed 67 online courses for free!
Now’s a good time to pick up a new skill and/or certification for your CV.
Or perhaps you have a friend or relative that has a hard time deciphering fact from fiction within the news – there’s a course called Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking where you’ll be able to ” evaluate the strength of an argument” and to ” identify logical fallacies in arguments”.
http://online-learning.Harvard.edu/catalog
