5 Things You Should Know – Part 245

Here are 5 things you should know.

1. If you are in the U.S., you should throw away any type of romaine lettuce in your home, restaurant, etc.

The CDC released a warning: https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2018/o157h7-11-18/index.html

From the article:

• This advice includes all types or uses of romaine lettuce, such as whole heads of romaine, hearts of romaine, and bags and boxes of precut lettuce and salad mixes that contain romaine, including baby romaine, spring mix, and Caesar salad.

• If you do not know if the lettuce is romaine or whether a salad mix contains romaine, do not eat it and throw it away.

• Wash and sanitize drawers or shelves in refrigerators where romaine was stored.

 Here’s a map of who got ill where: https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2018/o157h7-11-18/map.html

Canada too: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/public-health-notices/2018/outbreak-ecoli-infections-linked-romaine-lettuce.html

2. How to react if you get an e-mail from yourself saying your account has been hacked.

To understand this scam you need to know two things:

1.- How is it that it looks like I sent it myself?

“From: spoofing” is hard to explain but essentially it means that, if you know what you’re doing, you can make the receiver of your email think that it was sent from a different address, even their own.

2.- How did they get my password?

There are basically two options:

• You got caught in some kind of phishing and accidentally gave your password away to someone with malicious intent.

• One or more of the websites you use was hacked and your e-mail address and password you use for that site got posted somewhere on the internet for all to see.

Now, how do you fix it?

First, we need to be sure that it actually wasn’t sent from your account, so go to your “sent” folder and check whether or not you actually sent it; If not, then go to the next step. If it was sent from your account, get help from someone that knows more about this because it means your e-mail account has indeed been broken into and that a bigger problem. According to this article https://www.tomsguide.com/us/spam-gmail-sent-folder,news-27042.html it’s possible for spam to actually appear in your “sent” folder. I’d still be cautious though.

Now, about the password:

There’s basically nothing you can do about it except changing your password, but don’t just change it to another easy one, so listen: there’s this program called KeePass, it’s free and open source, which means it’s not a “trade your privacy in return of it being free”, but a project people contribute to help others out. The program lets you store your passwords in an encrypted file that’s only accessible by a master password. Having this program, there’s no excuse to have an “easy to remember” password to use everywhere. It generates random passwords for you to use and you can just store them in your file.

To create a very secure master password, this is very useful: https://www.xkcd.com/936/

There are more things that go into it. This article is much more useful: https://crambler.com/password-security-why-secure-passwords-need-length-over-complexity/ ) but I’d also recommend to never give your master password away and don’t make any accounts with it, no matter how much you trust the site. And for the love of God, when creating a password file READ THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY. Frequently Back up the password file to a secure cloud server like google drive and, if you can, print the file that it gives you so you can recover your passwords if somehow the whole file gets lost or you forget the master password.

If you want to know if a password associated with your email address has been leaked, check out https://haveibeenpwned.com

3. If any of your Amazon “save for later” items go on sale you’ll get a notification.

Includes lighting deals!

4. You can easily convert an hourly wage to salary (and vice versa) by doubling the amount and adding three zeros. It’s not exact but is really useful to estimate the amount in your head.

For example $15.00 / hour to salary is 15 x 2 + 000 = $30,000 / year.

Actual amount (based on a 40 hour work week) is $31,200. Pretty close for just doing the math in your head.

5. If you’re a student, you can get Windows 10 (Home, Pro, Education) for FREE through your school.

Check On The Hub if your school (elementary, high school, university) has any software deals. And it’s not linked to your school email. You just need a school email for verification, and you are set. This can save you a lot of money!