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Anton

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  1. I guess you thought about the real estate taxes? I.e. the ones you pay every year once you own the place? If you do all the repairs yourself, you may be paying real estate taxes over a lower purchase price. If the seller does all the repairs and if you buy for a higher price, you may be paying real estate taxes over a higher purchase price.
  2. This happened to www.hookers.nl, a Dutch website. So no panic. But it may be useful to read the story and learn how to protect yourself. What I found interesting is the sentence "It's not the question whether your website will be hacked, but when." If you want to know if your email address ever fell into the wrong hands, then you may want to try: - http://haveibeenpwned.com/ - https://scatteredsecrets.com/ Here's a link to the article: https://nos.nl/artikel/2305470-e-mailadressen-bezoekers-prostitutieforum-uitgelekt-en-te-koop-aangeboden.html Here's my translation: Email addresses from visitors of prostitution forum were leaked and offered for sale. The account data of 250,000 users of the Dutch website Hookers.nl have been leaked. This also included email addresses. The website is popular among visitors of prostitutes and escorts, they all share experiences and tips. Research from the NOS shows that a hacker has captured the data of the members and is offering the data for sale, after an anonymous source reported the leak. In addition to e-mail addresses, the data also includes user names, IP addresses, and passwords. The passwords are secured, and cannot be hacked, but users' email addresses are readable. The data, part of which has been seen by the NOS, shows that many forum members use an email address from which their real name can be derived. $300 The hacker is asking $300 for the data. In his own words, he misused a large data breach in commonly used forum software that became known last week. Hookers.nl confirms the data breach and promises to send a notification to all users this morning about the leakage of the account data. "Membership of this forum is definitely something you can be extorted with" - Arda Gerkens, Help Wanted The biggest danger for users on the site is now probably blackmail. "Membership of such a forum is definitely something you can be extorted with," says Arda Gerkens of Helpwanted.nl, who assists young victims of sex-related abuse. "Some people make no secret of their prostitution visits, but especially when people use a nickname, it appears they want to remain anonymous." The file that the NOS received showed that people often have an anonymous user name, but a traceable email address. What should you do if your data is in the Hookers.nl leak? If you fear becoming a victim of extortion, Helpwanted.nl recommends that you never pay. "That really doesn't make sense," says spokeswoman Arda Gerkens. If you pay, there is no guarantee that the extortionists then ask for more money or that someone else tries the same. "If you are contacted, make screenshots of the message, block that person and file charges", says Gerkens. "And if you're really afraid that others may get to know, it's better to carry the conversation with your wife or your boss yourself." Users who have an account on Hookers.nl, are advised to make their social media accounts private according to Gerkens. "That makes it harder to trace you and your acquaintances. " This is not only a problem for customers of sex workers: prostitutes and escorts are also active on the website. They don't always want to be familiar with their real name as a sex worker either, for example because their environment is unaware. Not happy The organization behind the website also realizes the sensitivity. "Obviously this is not an account of your ISP that leaks, maybe you don't want people to know that you have an account here," says Midhold spokesman Tom Löbermann, from the site. "We are not happy with this." It wouldn't be the first time that users are being extorted because of their membership of a controversial website. Four years ago the personal data of members of the adultery site Ashley Madison ended up on the street because of hackers. Back then, users were extorted, marriages ended, and even suicides were reported as a result of the data breach. Sold The hacker says the data has not yet been sold, but expects that to happen. "I know for sure that people want to buy it, bro", is what he tells us. He doesn't feel guilty for the affected forum members. "This is roughly less than three hundred thousand users ", he says. "Tens of thousands of websites are hacked a day. I'm not the devil. It's not the question whether your website will be hacked, but when." Hookers.nl is not the only website that has been affected by a leak in the popular forum software vBulletin. The forum of the computer security guard Comodo was also hacked that way. How did we do our research? Before Hookers.nl confirmed the leak, the NOS first verified whether the claims about the data breach were correct. We contacted the vendor of the database, presented ourselves as interested buyer and asked for a sneak preview. We received it: the seller sent us the data of a thousand members. We did not pay the seller. Then we verified whether the data was really about users of Hookers.nl. We also used the 'Forgot password feature' of Hookers.nl. By entering email addresses and clicking 'Forgot Password', we checked if an email address appeared in in the database. We did this with five email addresses that were randomly selected. Although a user gets an email in his inbox stating that someone has attempted to recover his or her password, we found this an appropriate way to check if the email addresses from the dataset were actually from Hookers.nl . We needed to exclude that this was other data. By doing online searches we also checked if there were existing people behind the individual accounts of Hookers.nl. All information collected by us will be deleted after publication. ~~~
  3. I use SyncIos, www.syncios.com . You can download a trial version for free. It can be used for Android phones too. With SyncIos I noticed that some pictures that I had deleted, and then deleted from the trash, were still lingering on on my phone. Now I don't delete them any more on my phone. I transfer them to my laptop using SyncIos. Oh, and you can do much more than just pictures with it.
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