Facebook scams and removing Facebook posts

 

Facebook scams are proliferating lately, and I just got tricked by one of them, too :-(
It starts with a friend sharing a link like "Crazy girl must be nuts but also a damn smart for mak1ng this video". If you click it and follow the "age verification" prompts that follow you'll only help the malware spread - as it will add without your knowledge an identical post to your wall.
The Jaa button in the “age verifications” prompts is not the German word for Yes, but the Finnish word for Share :-)
So, if you see such posts, don't follow the links!

Graham Cluley security analyst at Sophos Antivirus describes better similar malware on his blog
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/07/12/a-spider-under-the-skin-its-a-facebook-survey-scam/

If  you made the mistake of following the link, and now you have an unwanted post on your wall, here is how to delete the post from the Facebook page: Hover the post in your wall. An X blue button will appear in the right of the message. Use the button

Click the button to open a context menu and choose to Report it – it will remove it and report as malware. The same removal X button can be accessed from the post’s thread page (that you can access by clicking the link with the timestamp of the post, highlighted above)

“Visual Studio was my idea”

 

Not mine, but yours. Well, it’s not entirely true, but you get the idea. If you have suggestions for improving the next versions of Visual Studio, you can make your voice heard by posting or voting on existing posts at  http://visualstudio.uservoice.com

Samsung Focus not charging

 

Today I run into a hardware bug with my Samsung Focus – no matter how long I’d keep the phone plugged in, it showed the same battery level, somewhere at 30%. I reset the phone, but instead of fixing the problem, it made it worse - now the battery level was shown at 0%, and again, keeping the phone plugged in had no effect. The phone was simply not charging. Now every time I was unplugging the phone it displayed notifications that battery level is too low and I should plug it back in.

I searched the net and I found that other users had similar problems, and the “fix” was to return the phone to the carrier provider for a refund/exchange. Ugh. Then I found another user who fixed his phone by resetting the phone in diagnostics mode. Fortunately his solution worked for me, too. Here it is: Start the phone application and show the keyboard Type ##634# - this enters the phone diagnostics mode Type *#2*# - this displays the battery information. All the numbers on the first page in the (MV) section were shown as 0% or 0mV. Now reset the phone (by keeping pressed the power button until the phone turns off, then press it again to turn the phone back on) After reset, the battery level started showing 100% (it was about time, after being kept so long plugged in), and re-entering the battery information diagnostics page seemed to agree – now it was showing non-null numbers, all good.

You can find more interesting diagnostics codes about Samsung Focus on XDA-Developers forum page.