Monthly Archives: September 2021

New (to me) spam / scam

At first glance I thought it was just a sales pitch, but it looked really bad. And then you look more. The random email it’s from (not a ‘[email protected]’ or similar), the to that isn’t even us (I don’t work for comcast), and the oddly spaced phone number. I copied the whole text and dropped it into notepad (note to self: install notepad++ on this machine). Notepad works, and is on every windows machine. It doesn’t do fancy fonts so any hidden text will show up

Bingo. Now we see it really is doing something weird there. The contact now is a string of numbers with a different font colour to obfuscate it.

It was at this point I actually read the text and wondered what legitimate company would charge you in gift cards. And felt dumb for not noticing that before.

Now I just have to figure out if it is the FTC, or the FCC that I can report this to (or both?)

Webinars and making you download and install their app!

Just stop please. Let me use the web client. I don’t need a bunch of extra apps on my machine

Also, gotowebinar was trying to make me use the app, and didn’t show the ‘use web version’ after downloading, so I searched and found the way to make it use the browser (from https://support.goto.com/webinar/help/how-do-i-join-a-webinar-from-the-instant-join-app) but in short, take the link and add ?clientType=html5 on the end

The other’s I’ve had to use it makes you download something but then gives you a ‘connect online’ option.

I admire Microsoft’s honesty

A user was trying to record something in streams and share it with a vendor. Now this is all complicated anyway because Microsoft used to record directly to streams, then stopped for lower licensed but kept it for the upper ones last year, and now they are moving to onedrive entirely and not using streams (which I’m pretty sure is just a skin on sharepoint like onedrive is anyway but I digress…)

So I’m trying to find why the user can’t do this and find this article. To quote:

This error occurs because Stream can’t currently share to external users. This includes Azure Business to Business users.

What is the workaround, you may ask. I’m glad you did!

To work around this issue, store the video in another location. For example, add the video to a SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Library location that enables external sharing, and then share the video to the external users.

In short. Streams can’t share externally, and the workaround is not to use streams. Microsoft Video is still around and it looks like they are killing off streams too. At least they are moving to OneDrive.