Category: Personal

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Netflix Hacking Countermeasures

So one day, I noticed that my language setting was changed to Italian suddenly on my Netflix account. Very confused, I changed it back to English. Vulcan wasn’t an option. Soon, it changed back again to Italian. Upon going to “Account” –> “Recent Device Streaming Activity”, I noticed lots of activities from Italy! It could be from yet another country since VPN could hide it but then since language settings was changed to Italian, I think it is from there. I quickly changed my password and forced all devices to be logged out. Problem fixed, right?
 
That’s what I thought. That was a month or two ago. My son told me that he saw the Italian language option again on his profile. Erg. So evidently, just changing your password and forcing all devices to be logged out doesn’t really work. (FIX IT NETFLIX!) So this time, I changed email address and made the password stronger. So far so good. So here are my lessons learned:
 
  1. Check your “Recent Device Streaming Activity” at least once a month to see if your account is hacked or compromised
  2. If your account is compromised, change BOTH email and password since you can’t rely on Netflix’ own “Sign out of all devices” to work. After I had done that, both of my kids were still able to access their accounts without having to reenter information!
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Grunting of a Smalltime Seller

Erg…

That’s how I feel right now… I sell stuff from time to time.  After I upgraded from my Note 4, I sold it off on eBay.  Other gadgets and stuff that’s sitting around, I try to recoop some cost.  I expect to not make profit.  But it’s been anti-small seller sentiment recently.

I have accounts on both eBay and Amazon to sell.  But I have gripes about both.  And if you are a small seller like me who doesn’t sell more than few items a month, if a year, you will likely understand my frustration.

eBay

I’ve been a long-time member and it was relatively friendly to sellers like me.  Now, that’s not the case.  I get (winning) bids from people who win it only to not pay.  It takes several days to get it resolved and eventually get refunded on the listing fees.  But it doesn’t end there, as a seller, I can’t leave negative feedback to a deadbeat bidder!!  What the hell is this?!  I’m gonna rant on saying that eBay protects its bidders too much.  I already lose fees double time (eBay & PayPal) so it’s already frustrating but seriously…  I’m done.

Amazon

Amazon gets some serious exposure so the headphones that I had to re-list 3 times on eBay sold on Amazon!  But again, Amazon isn’t friendly to small sellers like me.  Why?  For an item that I listed for $45 (Amazon gives $4 credit for shipping), Amazon took more than $10 for the selling fee!  Again… what the hell?!!  That’s almost 25%!!  Not to mention that measly $4 credit for shipping makes me lose another $6 due to actual cost being bit over $10!  So in all, I sold $45 item and only recovered less than $30!  I’m done with Amazon as well (as a seller)!

So then where can I sell?!

So where does that leave me?  I don’t enjoy taking random time out to meet random strangers through Craigslist either.  So I list them locally.  Nextdoor.com anyone?  Or for the tech stuff, I also list (for free) on Anandtech Forums.

eBay and Amazon, please make things bit more REASONABLE!!  Otherwise, we, the small time sellers, are done!  So done!!  Thanks for reading this ranting!

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From Discover: Q&BA: Why spend money on NASA?

I wholeheartedly agree and endorse this article…
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During last week’s Q&BA live video chat session on Google+, I got the question, “Why spend money on NASA when we need that money here on Earth?”

This is a common question, and very apropos given the terrible budget news we got about NASA earlier today. So I put my answer up on YouTube. We’ll be hearing this argument a lot in the upcoming budget battles, and hopefully this’ll help show why we need to spend money on NASA, even more than we are now.

I have a lot of blog posts dealing with this issue, since it comes up so often. You’ll find all them linked in this blog post: Debating Space. We need to be exploring space, and we need to be investing in our future. Science and exploration are our future.

from Discover

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From NPR News: Stephen Colbert Wants You To Know: That’s Definitely Not His SuperPAC

As funny as Colbert is, his parody and punts reveal a LOT of truth on how corrupt politicians can be…  Read on… and watch the clips…

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Stephen Colbert had a superPAC. Jon Stewart has it now. But they’re totally not coordinating with each other — or so they explain when parodying campaign finance laws as part of Colbert’s latest operation.

from NPR News