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Pennsylvania woman gets $284 billion dollar electric bill

Justin Werner
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Pennsylvania woman gets $284 billion dollar electric bill

A Pennsylvania woman got the shock of a lifetime when she checked her electric bill online and found that she owed more than $284 billion.

Mary Horomanski, of Erie, told GoErie.com that she wasn’t immediately positive the bill was a mistake. “My eyes just about popped out of my head,” Horomanski, 58, told the site. “We had put up Christmas lights and I wondered if we had put them up wrong.”

billions electric bill

Luckily, Horomanski’s son called the electric company, Penelec, before his mother made December’s minimum payment of $28,156. The company quickly deemed the bill a mistake and changed Horomanski’s balance to the correct amount: $284.46.

A spokesperson for First Energy, Penelec’s parent company, told GoErie.com that he wasn’t sure how the error had happened, but that, “I can’t recall ever seeing a bill for billions of dollars. We appreciate the customer’s willingness to reach out to us about the mistake.”

Good thing she didn’t have autopay.

From the FBI: Debt Elimination Scams

Justin Werner
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From the FBI: Debt Elimination Scams

fbiWelcome to the Oregon FBI’s Tech Tuesday segment. This week, building a digital defense against debt elimination scams.

Welcome to your day-after-Christmas-oh-my-gosh-how-much-did-I-just spend-hangover. The good news is — you aren’t alone. The bad news is that there is no easy way to get rid of that post-holiday debt… despite what all those folks on your social media feed may say.

So how does this kind of scam work? The bad guys target consumers with significant credit card debt and promise to negotiate on your behalf to reduce the debt or get rid of it all together. They often charge an up-front fee and then fail to do much if anything. And, remember when you thought they were going to help you and you gave them all your personal info — including your social security number, bank account number and credit card details? Well, now you are also at risk for ID theft.

These scammers promote their alleged “services” on the Internet, via emails or social media posts. Sometimes they even give seminars. They often promote inaccurate information about supposedly secret laws such as the conspiracy theory that says credit card companies and banks cannot loan money legally. Sounds crazy but these bad actors can be very convincing. The variations on these types of scams are endless.

So how can you protect yourself? 

Do your homework on the service or counselor and shop around. Ask questions and get answers in writing. Check them out with the Better Business Bureau.
Don’t give anyone your bank account number or other financial information that could allow him to access your accounts.
Don’t send money to strangers, unsolicited contacts, or people you don’t know face-to-face.
Don’t respond to unsolicited emails or click on unsolicited links to application forms or websites.
Don’t trust unsolicited social media posts from “friends” saying a service worked for them without confirming it from your friend directly. Many times those accounts are hacked or spoofed.
Don’t trust anything that seems like an easy way to eliminate debt. You can’t eliminate an obligation to pay a debt simply by paying someone a fee.

If you have been victimized by this scam, you can file an online report at the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at www.ic3.gov or call your local FBI office.

Free Haven App By Edward Snowden Turns Phones Into Security Systems

Justin Werner
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Free Haven App By Edward Snowden Turns Phones Into Security Systems

haven

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has released an app that will transform your spare Android smartphone into a mobile security system for the protection of your home.

Named Haven, the app is free to download and is relatively very easy to set up and use compared to traditional home security systems.

Edward Snowden’s Haven: Here’s What It Does

Haven is an Android app that was created through a partnership between The Guardian Project, a global collective of developers who create open-source security software, and Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that Snowden leads as president and board member.

Haven, which is now available for downloading through Github and the Google Play Store, turns any Android smartphone into a motion, sound, light, and vibration detector to provide security to households. This is made possible by the array of sensors that manufacturers include in smartphones.

When Haven is installed and activated, users may place the Android smartphone in any part of the home that requires additional security. Haven will turn on the camera when it detects movement, open the device’s microphone when it detects sound, catch changes in light through the ambient light sensor, and recognize if the smartphone itself is moving through its accelerometer.

Haven will then automatically send updates to the primary phone of users through Signal, an encrypted messaging app that is also backed by Snowden. Haven will send real-time updates, including video and audio, but users can also access the app’s log on the smartphone or remotely through the Tor browser.

Haven is currently unavailable for the iOS. Users with iPhones, however, can still benefit from Haven by purchasing an inexpensive Android smartphone to use with the app. Users can then install Signal in their iPhone to receive real-time updates and the Onion Browser to remotely access the logs.

 

Snowden’s Latest Security Tool

“Imagine if you had a guard dog you could take with you to any hotel room and leave it in your room when you’re not there. And it’s actually smart, and it witnesses everything that happens and creates a record of it,” said Snowden in an encrypted phone call from Moscow to WIRED.

 

Since Snowden joined the Freedom of the Press Foundation, he has led a team that works on the development of security tools. Their projects so far include an encryption software that only reveals the protected data if collaborators combine their secret keys and a hardware mod for iPhones that detects if malware is secretly sending out user information.

Lincoln City Pack 47 Christmas Carnival

Justin Werner
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Lincoln City Pack 47 Christmas Carnival
The Bear Den threw a Christmas Carnival and EVERYONE had a great time!

The Lincoln City Pack 47 Christmas Carnival was a kid friendly event held at the North Lincoln Fire & Rescue station and it featured a bunch of cool games for kids to play. Pack 47 was collecting canned food at the door for the Backpacks for Kids program. 

It was a well organized event with scouts running the booths. A bag of tickets was given to kids for the different games so they could win prize tickets that could be spent on some quality prizes.

lincoln city pack 47

The Toilet Paper Toss 

This game tasked participants with throwing rolls of TP into a Christmas present with a toilet seat on it. The more times you made it, the more tickets you won. It was funny to see the kids looking down into the toilet seat to see what was in there.

 

Pie Eating Contest

Contestants in this game had to race against an opponent to eat the gummy bear at the bottom of a pile of whipped cream with their hands tied behind their back. This was a very funny event to watch as every contestant inevitably came up from their plate with some amount of whipped cream on their face, neck, or hair.

penny toss pack 47The Penny Drop

Dropping a penny into water and making it in a jar seems like an easy feat to accomplish but after watching multiple attempts one can see it is not that easy. Participants that were sure they would win came up empty because of the science of water when pennies hit it. Even from six inches the penny would jump around like a fish in the water.

pack 47 christmas ornamentsChristmas Ornaments

Making Christmas ornaments with a Boy Scout was a nice change of pace for the kids and they were making some really great ones. Crafting was done by wrapping a triangle piece of cardboard with green yarn and gluing a Popsicle stick to make a tree. Then they decorated the tree with green and red fuzzy balls and the result was instant masterpieces.

The Photo Booth

Christmas pictures were available and the props were great. The background was well done and having a spot for pictures was a great idea. The Photo Booth reminds parents that its not guaranteed that your kid is going to smile. Not even when you do your funniest thing.

 

Nerf Gun Shooting Range

This game had the longest continuous line due to its popularity. Everyone wanted to prove their sharp shooting skills with the Nerf Guns. Shooters took aim and fired at Popsicle stick targets or a drawn target on the white board. The number of points scored translated into how many tickets you got. It was fun watching the scout dad catch errant “bullets” as they bounced off the target.

 

Guessing Booth – At this booth the goal was simple. Guess how many items are in a jar of your choice.

pack 47 lincoln cityThis was a great opportunity for the community to hang out with scouts and win some prizes doing fun stuff. Highly recommended you add this to your list for next year.

Thanks Pack 47!

pack 47

 

 

 

 

David Elton Letter

Justin Werner
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David Elton Letter
It is with great concern I recently heard that our beloved Mayor, Don Williams,
is seriously considering resigning from office due to the zealous and illegal (in my opinion)
actions brought by the embittered city attorney, Richard Appicello. (www.Appicello.com )
I have been investigating Richard Appicello for almost four years. In my opinion
he takes quasi-judicial actions and breaks the law almost every week. That sounds
like hyperbole, but if you spend 5 or 10 minutes at a website and read, you will see
that our city of Lincoln has a city attorney that behaves like a spoiled child and a rather
mediocre attorney. Worst of all, he takes actions that are tantamount to what is known
in the legal industry as a “SLAPP”. This is an acronym for;
Strategic 
Lawsuit
Against
Public
Participation
I recall law school at Stanford when I was 20 years old and the saying was
“Libel is in the bible, “Slander gets up your dander” (Gander?)
With Chester Noreikis calling the mayors veracity into question, we have a veritable
mutiny of dirty and prevaricational politicians plotting the anti-ethical overthrow
of a very good and decent, God fearing man.
With up to 5 lawyers looking at this we are almost ready to bring forth a major action.
I have been very direct at city council meetings where I mention to Mr. Appicello
that I am convinced his actions, in tandem with police chief Keith Kilian, amount
to a breach of trust with the public. (The News Guard and Newport News Times
have BOTH been asleep at the wheel with regard to this important story)
The problem with a breach of trust in a small town is that the public often does not
know at all. If they do know something from a small town newspaper, they are likely
to get the version where the local newspaper,(reliant upon the revenue of the
legal announcements) prints the version most likely to not upset the city manager.
Since the city attorney, Appicello, and the city manager (Ron Chandler) often act as one
cohesive unit, this guaranties that a small town newspaper delivers a news item
that is “scrubbed” clean so as to not diminish or put into peril that revenue source.
This is all rather nerdy and yet it delivers what we all know is currently happening.
~CORRUPTION~
Ladies and gentlemen of Lincoln City, welcome to small town politics, 101.
The city attorney of Lincoln City engages in abuse of power and he should resign.
The legal case and those precise arguments will be left to Micah Fargey and David Beal.
Lincoln City needs a “Strong Mayor” form of government, as opposed to “City Manager”.
That is the next step for a beach town with growing pains.
Make sure to visit www.Appicello.com  and have a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
_____________________________________________________________________
David Elton is a resident of Pier 48 where he lives on the beach near TAFT in Lincoln City.
Elton is a former Republican pollster and strategist as well as a speechwriter for lawyers & leaders
Elton operates a bed and breakfast known as “SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION” BnB just south of Inn@Spanish Head
Elton attended Stanford Law School as well as BYU Law School, before deciding to NOT become a lawyer.
Elton owns “ToToJD”, a company that investigates lawyers, judges, police and CEO’s.

U.S. life expectancy fell in 2016: CDC

Justin Werner
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0
U.S. life expectancy fell in 2016: CDC

life expectancy

Life expectancy among Americans has fallen for the second year in a row as the opioid crisis continues to drive up overall death rates in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday.

A total of 63,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016, up 21 percent from 2015, according to the CDC report. Opioid-related overdoses surged 28 percent, killing 42,249 people, mostly in the 25-to-54 age group.

“The escalating growth of opioid deaths is downright frightening – and it’s getting worse,” John Auerbach, chief executive officer of the public health advocacy group Trust for America’s Health, said in a statement.

The increase largely stemmed from the continued escalation of deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which jumped to 19,410 in 2016 from 9,580 in 2015 and 5,540 in 2014, according to a TFAH analysis of the report.

Heroin, an illegal opioid, accounted for around 15,500 deaths, and prescription painkillers were involved in about 14,500, TFAH reported.

“These are not simply numbers – these are actual lives,” said Benjamin F. Miller, chief policy officer of Well Being Trust, a non-profit foundation focused on mental health issues. “Seeing the loss of life at this dramatic rate calls for more immediate action.”

President Donald Trump in October declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, which senior administration officials said would redirect federal resources and loosen regulations to combat abuse of the drugs. However, he stopped short of declaring a national emergency, a move he had promised months before and which would have freed up more federal money.

The surge in overdose deaths has depressed recent gains in U.S. life expectancy, which fell to an average age of 78.6, down 0.1 year from 2015 and marking the first two-year drop since 1962-1963.

Overdose rates rose in 40 states and in Washington, D.C., between 2015 and 2016, with 17 states seeing increases of 25 percent or more, according to the TFAH analysis.

“Every community has been impacted by this crisis,” Auerbach said, adding that the government was not making the investments needed to “turn the tide.”

As the opioid epidemic has worsened, many state attorneys general have sued makers of these drugs as they investigate whether manufacturers and distributors engaged in unlawful marketing behavior.

Reporting by Caroline Humer in New York and Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Jonathan Oatis

Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones To Save Battery Life

Justin Werner
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Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones To Save Battery Life

Confirming iPhone owners’ suspicions that Apple purposefully slows the operation of older phones, Apple says that it does just that — and that slowing down processors makes it easier for old batteries to perform after they’ve begun to lose capacity.

Apple is responding to owners of older phones who have increasingly said they notice slower performance after they upgrade their devices’ software. The difference was highlighted in a recent Reddit post — and it was quantified in a blog post at Geekbench, the processor bench-marking company.

Older phones operate more quickly if they’re using older versions of Apple’s iOS operating system, Geekbench found.

The slowdown affects a range of Apple phones, including the iPhone 7 and iPhone 6S, models that came out in 2016 and 2015, respectively. The company says it plans to apply the same strategy to “other products in the future.”

Smartphones’ lithium-ion batteries lose their pep as they age, but processors remain hungry for quick bursts of power. So, Apple used software to throttle the demand — effectively governing the speed at which the phones can operate.

The situation is prickly: More than 10 years after Apple introduced its first iPhone, the company says it’s trying to deliver the “best experience” to customers by preventing unexpected power-related shutdowns. In addition to addressing aging batteries, the company said it tries to “smooth out” power demand in phones that are operating in cold conditions or that have a low battery charge.

But some customers say the company’s strategy of dealing with the power demand pushes them to replace their older iPhones with newer models.

In the Reddit post that generated intense interest in Apple’s battery strategy earlier this month, a user named TeckFire reported that after noticing that different versions of the iPhone 6 series were running at vastly different speeds, they saw speeds pick up again once the battery on an iPhone 6S was replaced.

That post triggered responses in which other Apple customers wondered whether the battery ploy was also to blame for their older Macbook laptops not working as well as they once had.

Explaining how Apple’s approach could feed suspicions of “planned obsolescence,” John Poole, founder of Geekbench parent Primate Labs, writes, “users may believe that the slow down is due to [central processing unit] performance, instead of battery performance.”

Despite the battery being the reason that Apple is slowing the phones, Poole adds, “This fix will also cause users to think, ‘My phone is slow so I should replace it’ not, ‘My phone is slow so I should replace its battery.’ ”

The discrepancy between processors and batteries runs deep — and it’s increasingly being highlighted, as lithium-ion batteries are recognized as not having much room for improvement. As Kristin Persson, a professor of materials and engineering at University of California, Berkeley, told Marketplace on Thursday morning, lithium-ion batteries are “highly optimized,” and researchers have been working on creating a better battery.

Persson told Marketplace’s Molly Wood:

“So if you compare batteries to, for example, computers, the difference is really that in batteries you have to invent new materials to make them better, whereas in semiconductors, you’re inherently, most of the time, using the same materials and you’re just making them smaller, which is easier.”

Here is Apple’s statement on the battery/CPU issue:

“Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.

“Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.”

Driftwood Library Solstice Celebration

Justin Werner
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Driftwood Library Solstice Celebration

driftwood public library

Thursday December 21st at 6:30 PM the Driftwood Public Library will have its annual Winter Solstice Celebration event in the Distad reading Room. Anyone is free to come to the library and enjoy food and acoustic music. There will be librarians mingling and a special story time.

“Driftwood Library Solstice Celebration is a time for the community to come together and celebrate the lengthening of the days.” – Ken “Hobbes” Hobson – Circulation Supervisor

driftwood library solstice celebration

For over a decade, the staff of Driftwood Public Library have been hosting a Winter Solstice event that brings together, musicians and poets (and cookies) from throughout Lincoln County. The community is invited to share in this evening of calm, reflection and good cheer as we welcome the sun back into our lives. The event takes place as close to the actual date of Solstice as we can manage, and is a welcome respite during the Holiday bustle. Many Lincoln City residents have made this event an annual tradition in their Holiday schedule. Please keep an eye on the Current Events page.

Driftwood Public Library will be closed Sunday, December 24th; Monday, December 25th; and Monday, January 1st for the holidays.

 

Mr. Smith Goes to Lincoln City – Legalcide Podcast

Justin Werner
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Mr. Smith Goes to Lincoln City – Legalcide Podcast

legalcide podcast

by Jeff Jones, Law Professor, Lewis and Clark Law School

ross-smith

Most Americans go their entire lives without exercising any of their local rights.  Like the right to be given notice of City Council meetings; the right to attend and participate; and the right to request public records from the municipalities that tax us, regulate us, and police us.

But local participation is the only way local governments can be held accountable.  This is the story of one man who tried to hold his local government accountable … and the price he paid.  Up next: Mr. Smith Goes to Lincoln City.

Podcast courtesy of Legalcide.com and Jeffrey D. Jones, J.D., Ph.D.

OSP Warning: GPS Dangers

Justin Werner
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OSP Warning: GPS Dangers

gps warning

From the Oregon State Police

Highway 22 is currently closed and motorists traveling between Central Oregon and the Willamette Valley are being urged to take Highway 20 through Sweet Home or Highway 26 through Government Camp.

Over the weekend, OSP Dispatch received several calls of motorists attempting to take Highway 22, but being rerouted by their GPS units onto Forest Service roads near Detroit. One motorist became stuck in the snow and the other ran out of gas. Often these Forest Service Roads are not maintained in the winter and are snow covered. Additionally there is little to no cell coverage in these areas.

In 2006, a tragedy occurred in Josephine County, when the James Kim family followed GPS directions into BLM land during winter conditions. The family became stranded and after two days. James Kim left on foot for help. He was later found deceased due to exposure to the elements. The remaining members of his family were located and rescued.

Travelers are urged to stay on maintained roads and state highways, while navigating the mountain passes. Motorists are also urged to carry with them an emergency kit while traveling. The Oregon Department of Transportation website lists the following items to be carried in your vehicle for safety:

Working flashlight and extra batteries;
Reflective triangles and brightly-colored cloth;
Compass;
First Aid Kit;
Exterior windshield cleaner;
Ice scraper and snow brush;
Wooden stick matches in a waterproof container;
Scissors and string/cord;
Non-perishable, high-energy foods like unsalted canned nuts, dried fruits and hard candy;
Bottled water;
Properly inflated spare tire, wheel wrench and tripod-type jack;
Shovel;
Jumper cables;
Tow and tire chains;
Bag of salt or cat litter; &
Tool kit.

Added items for driving long distances in cold, snowy, and icy conditions:

  • Gloves
  • Socks
  • Cap
  • Blanket

    For more information on the HWY 22 closure, check Oregon Department of Transportation www.tripcheck.com.

    #HolidayTravel #WinterDriving #StaySafe

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