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A fun new scam is cropping up, similar to the scary sounding spam about infringing photos which phishes you for sensitive information, but this one seems a little less nefarious. Instead of looking to capture your sensitive data, “scammers” (likely more like black-hat SEOs) write to you posing as a client or “on behalf of” a client, claiming you are using one of their copyrighted photos on your website without their permission. A client recently forwarded one of these emails to us, which made us aware of the backlink scam. Here’s how the email went: Hello there, You are using…

That title? That’s just here for search engine optimization. Yup, I went there. The fact of the matter is, there is no war on Christmas keywords (There’s also not really a war on Christmas, but that’s a whole other topic!). If anything, there’s a war on other winter holiday keywords.

While the internet isn’t exactly in a complete and total uproar about this like some of our previous installments of calm down, internet, many of our clients are sending us emails questioning the content of this spam — and rightfully so. In today’s “calm down, internet” we talk about a scammy piece of spam that threatens to take legal action against people for using “illustrations” or “photographs” that don’t belong to them.

Yesterday I came across an interesting post in a group I am part of. This post linked to another post on a forum, which described various ways that Facebook is going to be changing. Basically the post, which can be viewed here, said “a friend of mine was at a place and this is what they believe they heard”.

You may have heard a bit about net neutrality recently. The reason for this being that the FCC unveiled a plan yesterday (11/22/2017) to roll back protections put in place in 2015 to preserve net neutrality. Many people understand what this means, and others do not. This is where I’m going to derail: this is different from our usual calm down, internet posts, as calming down is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing. You should be freaking out. Everyone should be freaking out. This is a huge problem, and you should be freaking out That being said,…

Recently, my newsfeed was blowing up with people who were very concerned over news articles stating that Facebook was “moving non-promoted posts from the general news feed”. Rightly so if you were to read a headline like that. If you’re a small business or a business that relies on word-of-mouth or social media to sell things without dumping a ton of money into advertising (say, you’re an artist, for one) this can sound extremely scary. However, as with most things people lose their minds over, I sigh, click on it, read the whole article, then explain to people why the…