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Your Mind is Conditioned in The Gap

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Last year I discovered "Dependent Origination", a Buddhist teaching. During my mindfulness enquiry I came across a podcast episode on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, I highly recommend it. On it was Andrea Fella of the Insight Meditation Center, Redwood, California, USA.

Listening to her being interviewed I could have sworn that she was almost shouting, well at least talking at an elevated pitch to try and get the concept of Dependent Origination across. I was thinking, wow this person is quite aggressive, actually I'm not sure if I want to listen to this, but I persisted as she was talking about matters I had never heard of or understood, except to say that after a while I started listening so attentively that I needed to learn more and investigated Andrea further. She was obviously 'shouting' for a reason and that was for ME to pay attention!

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China! Maybe they have sorted Social Media addiction?

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I have no idea where China is with Social Media/Big Tech, but I gained a bit of an insight by listening to an episode titled “A fresh take on Tech in China” on the podcast ‘Your Undivided Attention’, which features Tristan Harris, who Co-founded Humane Tech and starred in The Social Dilemma. Do check out these two websites.

https://www.humanetech.com/podcast
https://www.thesocialdilemma.com

I first came across Tristan via an awesome Ted Talk, “How a handful of Tech companies control billions of minds every day”.

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Oh LinkedIn Help, know thyself!

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I have been observing the fact that LinkedIn Polls are taking over our newsfeeds. I was guilty early on, got massive engagement on a few polls, but it led to nothing, just like most posts these days on Social.

I saw the flood of polls flowing into my newsfeed and soon realised that everyone now knows that polls get a lot of engagement and they're all going berserk!

Beserk: Out of control with anger or excitement; wild or frenzied.

I posted why it is actually so popular, it's no accident:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6868989560437645312

So, after experimenting for a week, by unfollowing every 1st level connection that posted a poll and muting them when they commented on other polls (2nd level), the amount didn't reduce. I must have unfollowed/muted at least 100 people, but it has made no difference whatsoever. I am absolutely convinced that LinkedIn's algorithm prioritises polls in our newsfeed. You may wonder why? Well, it's simple really, more eyeballs means more active users on the site, which they can promote to advertisers, because adverts are one of the biggest moneymakers for LinkedIn, as it is for most social media platforms.

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My love/hate relationship with LinkedIn

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To start with, I am so sorry that you have received an automatic invitation to subscribe my LinkedIn newsletter, 'Chalkboard Thoughts'. It's incredible that LinkedIn who has so many rules around inviting people to connect, can allow for everyone to be spammed with newsletter invitations. I stopped writing articles on LinkedIn some time ago, because basically the articles went into a black hole and received zero engagement.

The same happens with all new developments on LinkedIn, initially there's a surge and people are excited and engaged and after that it slows, reduces and eventually completely stops as the algorithm will eventually ignore it.

I guess they (LinkedIn) must have realised this over time and then opted for the newsletter approach, which exists now and has been rolled out to most of us. The only downside is that when you write the first article for your newsletter, your whole network gets invited to subscribe. For me it's like spamming your whole network and there's a risk that people will disconnect as a result of course. I hope you don't but then again you are free to choose whatever action you wish, as it happens I'm not as interested anymore in growing my network, anywhere.

But...

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Spam Report 7: Case Study profiling Adweek

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If you’re a marketer you will likely have read or heard of Adweek, correct? Yeah, me too. At one point I even had a shortcut in my Apple News app, which I rarely use nowadays. All news are ads, period.

Back to Adweek, out of the blue I received an email from Cindee Weiss, Production Director at Adweek. Don’t know her, never communicated with her, never signed up to anything from Adweek, as far as I know they are completely unknown to me.

I did my normal checking, which mail server, IP, domain etc. so I could report the domain. But nobody wanted to know, so I emailed Cindee and was astounded at her blatant response to my questions.

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Spam Report 6: Case Study Profiling Mailrush.io

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I received the following email from Keith Rainville.

Learn to build an email list of your best customers on LinkedIn or access our database of over 500 million businesses worldwide.

Then simply send the list with just an EmaiClik! [note the on-purpose spelling mistake to get through any spam filters!]

Build and send unlimited Cold Emails from the best all-in-one solution on the market.

One Monthly Charge for Unlimited Everything! All-in-one Solution!

What you get:

Build unlimited lists
Send unlimited lists
Sales sequence newsletter campaigns with unlimited email send
Linked auto-connect feature
Find emails from first name last name and company name
Find emails from domains
Chatbot solution to capture and convert visitors to leads

and much more...

Start your 7-day trial and get grandfathered in for just $99 per month.
Use Promo Code: WELCOME301 and save $30 on your first month for a limited time!

Cheers Keith Rainville

Founder/Developer

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Spam Report 5: Case Study profiling Tongue Tied (Manchester) Ltd

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The incidents of receiving unsolicited emails are increasing exponentially. I don’t know about you, but I definitely didn't have this many spam emails during the Covid-19 Lockdowns and I can confirm that it started to increase ever since we got back to a "new normal". I suspect that my email address has been collected from a business database and boom, many companies who are desperate for work are starting their spamming practice towards me! and some of you too?

In my world it is totally unacceptable that Richard emails me without having had any dealings with me previously, it is a clear example of what I call spray and pray. Spray your begging letter far and wide and Pray that someone will pick up on it. We’ve all been guilty of doing it, I can confirm I am definitely guilty of it, but I stopped it and will never send a marketing email to people I have had no dealings with ever again. The question has to be, why would you?

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Spam Report 4: Reporting Tools

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Since my counter spammerism journey, which I started at the end of March, I have managed to find many look-up tools to uncover mail servers, name servers, domain registrars, IP addresses and much more. This has allowed me to email directly to the owners of the mail or domain servers and report the abuse.

This has had very mixed results, I have to say, some will engage and get back to you and others you just don't hear anything from. It hasn't deterred me though, I knew I would learn more about spam and how it is constructed, the types of offenders and how the internet is basically flawed. Anyone who is persuaded to invest into Bitcoin derivatives I wish them luck. I can't imagine anything worse then having my money tied up in the flawed internet. Blockchain or not, how can you possible believe that when the Internet is basically flawed you would secure your hard-earned cash inside of it.

Anyway back to reporting tools. Sending direct emails to abuse@ email addresses is not really delivering the kind of results I was hoping for and then on top of that, there's one specific type of email that is, for me at least, impossible to identify its origin, mail or domain. This type of email are usually the ones that suggest that there's a bucket load of money waiting to be claimed by you, you know the ones, I should be a triple billionaire by now and of course I am not!

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Frances Haugen - Facebook Whistleblower

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Ever since Cambridge Analytica (2018) we all knew that Facebook and especially Mark Zuckerberg were lying. But as soon as the week was over we all ignored it, we went back to our feeds like zombies, until now perhaps?

In the past week Facebook went down for 6 hours globally, an accident or coincidence as Frances Haugen was about to provide a statement to Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation in the USA government.

This is her full statement lifted from her blogpost: https://www.franceshaugen.com/blog/b9xlswihkike7639nn4ie23odz9eqy

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Spam Report 3: Case Study profiling ABL Business Ltd

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Email received on 17 September, 2021 from Andy Redman, ABL Business Ltd. The individual or company is not known to me, I have never had any dealings with them, have never communicated with them or connected with them on Social Media.

Firstly the email he used to send to me isn't even my own company email. I do some freelancing for a drumming music teacher and in order to formalise communication with outside organisations I was given a company email address by the teacher. I hardly use this email and it's not in the public domain on many websites, although recently I did add this email to a Birmingham website.

Upon further investigation, I realised this was indeed a legitimate organisation and Andy Redman is real, I discovered their website and saw his name on LinkedIn too. Then I looked into the links at the bottom of the email, in particular the privacy statement. I then realised the privacy statement layout and information was exactly the same as two previous unsolicited emails I had received the previous day by Ideal Lighting and Print by Splash.

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Spam Report 2: Case Study profiling BairesDev

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As part of my journey uncovering email spammers, I have started publishing some of my results on LinkedIn and tagging individuals in organisations, especially the senior leaders. This strategy is definitely starting to have some impact. In the past two incidents I have received responses from the organisations involved, either by the person who has been tagged or someone who works in the organisation.

Dialogue is good, it means they are taking the exposure seriously. I’m not sure everyone knows that LinkedIn has a super powerful search engine and therefore the possibility of negative press and exposure is a very real possibility. At least I am discovering a positive method for using LinkedIn, instead of just posting adverts about what I am doing and promoting my business, which is basically how most use LinkedIn, that and of course the personal Facebook-like posts that are appearing all over these days.

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Spam Report 1: A journey into the dark web!

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They have finally have gotten to me, after years of being a prolific emailer and trying to circumnavigate the daily spammers, I have decided to take action. You could call it ‘war on spammers’ or ‘counterspammerism’, I’m going after them in a small way but even in a few short weeks I have been able to grow my knowledge about the ways that I can start making some impact.

This is the first of what will be several reports on my progress in an effort to share some insights, which others may wish to investigate themselves.

Just to set the scene. My computer is an Apple Mac, but because it’s 8 years old I’m on Catalina. I use Apple Mail on my Mac and my iOS devices, but the bulk of the heavy lifting of course will have to be done on the Mac as on iOS as far as I can see you can’t even interrogate the email header. Seeing as the email header is where the majority of the research takes place then all the work will have to be done on the Mac.

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Dear Beneficiary Dead or Alive

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We all receive spam emails, some are by legitimate spammers, you know the ones that add you to a list, where we can track down the email server they used and in some cases even unsubscribe, although that could be risky too.

And then there are the famous African inheritance emails, the ones that are usually untraceable and the only thing we can do is add them to junk and delete them. After all this time on email I am still astounded that tech companies have not been able to deal with these spam emails. We can send people into space, but we can’t stop spam emails.

Anyway this is probably the best one have received in quite a while. First of all they are offering me a fairly modest inheritance amount and secondly the subject line addresses me as either ‘Dead or Alive’. Seeing as my company name is Staying Alive UK, I couldn’t resist sharing it.

Not only is it addressed to ‘Dead or Alive’, it also asks me to confirm ‘if your are still alive’, which made me chuckle a lot.

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We're taught to use Social Media to promote ourselves?

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Jim was delighted, finally after years of spending thousands on printed marketing material, he had a digital alternative, social media! He was already super excited about reaching millions if not billions of people, just by sharing content on these amazing platforms for FREE.

He couldn't believe his luck, he blessed his stars that he was alive at this time of technological development, a development which the world had never seen before. Finally he could save thousands of printing and mailing costs and do it all for FREE!

It all seemed too good to be true, but yes indeed, it's 100% free. He couldn't sleep with excitement, he told everyone about it and soon all his friends, business associates and even family were just as excited as him, they too started to explore the possibilities of going digital, no more printing, who would have thought? Of course he felt a little sad for all those printers, but hey they didn't move with the times and it was ironic just as the printing press was such a technological feat in its own right, now it was being replaced by these marvellous social media companies.

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Sludge Theory is alive, well and thriving everywhere!

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The two defining characteristics of a sludge (Thaler, 2018) are “friction and bad intentions” (Goldhill, 2019). While Richard Thaler strongly advocates nudging for good by making desirable behaviour easier, a sludge does the opposite: It makes a process more difficult in order to arrive at an outcome that is not in the best interest of the sludged. Examples of sludges include product rebates that require difficult procedures, subscription cancellations that can only be done with a phone call and complicated or long government student aid application forms.

Even when a sludge is associated with a beneficial behaviour (as in student aid, voter registrations or driver’s licenses, for example), costs can be excessive. These costs may be a difficulty in acquiring information, unnecessary amounts of time spent, or psychological detriments, such as frustration (Sunstein, 2020).

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Why Facebook business pages are the ugliest on the web!

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If Facebook isn’t annoying enough, what gets my goat regularly how ugly, unfriendly and impossible their business pages are. Have you ever tried to manage a FB page? My recommendation is that if you never have, then don’t bother, it’s an absolute abomination. It’s possibly the ugliest web page I have witnessed in my life. So below I am sharing a few screenshots for you to marvel at and maybe when you see these in isolation you will potentially see how ugly it is.

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Social Media, you’ve made us all addicted!

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We’re now scrolling junkies. Why would we all waste our time scrolling through such utter nonsense, abuse, anger, ‘look at me’ posts, sharenting (parents sharing their kids), promotional jargon, show-off knowledge, repeated news stories, so-called opinions, thought leadership, questions as clickbait, engagement requests, follow requests, regular ads, so many examples, I could go on but I guess you get the idea.

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Why do humans inflict suffering on other humans?

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If you turn on any news channel or read any news publication or social media channel and pay careful attention to what is being said or written, you will discover that they basically report on human suffering.

It could be wars, ethnic cleansing, shootings, knife crimes, sexual assaults, human trafficking, drug offences and the list goes on, stories of countless human suffering inflicted on humans by other humans.

I've only started to wake up to human suffering after hearing the Dalai Lama speak about it a few years ago. He says that everyone is entitled to their human suffering and instead of interfering with it, we should have compassion for their suffering.

Everyone's entitled? But what if it is inflicted on the innocent, what if those that have been inflicted with suffering were just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

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The entertainment industry is emptying your bank account!

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I am a big fan of technology, there is no doubt that technology has improved my life significantly. Technology has been advancing exponentially of the past few decades and by far the biggest advancement has been the introduction of streaming services.

I am old enough to remember black and white TV, with just 3 channels, I am old enough to remember fax machines to send letters electronically, I am old enough to remember dial-up broadband at tortoise/turtle speeds, so the fact that we can stream movies and music is just mind blowing. Thank you to the engineers for creating this for us, we are truly grateful or are we?

TV never used to cost much, okay I am in the U.K. and we do pay an annual licence fee to watch programmes on the BBC, about £13.25 per month at time of writing and in return we receive no ads, yippee!

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A day in the life of a spammer…

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Jason Squires is a U.K. LinkedIn trainer and spammer. I’ve never heard of him, never had contact with him, never downloaded something from him and yet, he added me to his email list. He may have forgotten about GDPR and certainly sent his email to the worst possible recipient. You see I have been unsubscribing from emails for the past decade or maybe longer, so I can spot a spam email instantly, it stands out like a big SORE thumb, BOOM!

First things first figure out via the email header which email client he used and after a bit of careful examination I found that it was elasticemail. So found their website and reached out to them, it doesn’t always work, these companies don’t usually want to admit to their paying customers using their servers to spam people, but surprisingly this one responded back very fast with a very positive answer in terms of investigating it and taking action, you can see the start of the email thread below.