Double check your email address when registering anything

Looks like someone down in Florida bought a new cellphone.  How do I know?  As part of the registration they supplied an email address so they can get notifications, like their PIN number.  The problem is they used my account name and I got the notification of the cell phone number, plan information, PIN number, name, address.  I called Virgin Mobile USA and explained things and they started the process of trying to contact the customer, change the email address and lock the account from using my email account.  The person at the other end was very nice, professional and friendly and customer service is why I like Virgin Mobile.

This isn't the first time that something like this happened.  A couple of years ago I got a rather nasty, profane email from a woman in Ireland who thought she was venting at her ex.

For the Virgin Mobile phone I logged into the account as I wanted to make sure that I wasn't a victim of identity theft and they were using my credit card for their phone.  Fortunately it appears that I wasn't.

The thing is that when you register anything and they ask you for an email account make sure that you provide the correct one or someone else could be getting email that you don't want anyone else to get.

Main login

Checking to see if my Credit Card was used

Upgraded my netbook to 16.04

A couple of nights ago the updater said there was an upgrade to Linux.  Ubuntu is now 16.04 and I checked to see if Lubuntu itself was upgraded yet.  Not at this time, but, I figured it wouldn't hurt to see if the core would upgrade and the remainder still worked.  To summarize, yes, it upgraded.  Make sure you backup all of your documents, settings and any customizations to the system to an external drive before you start.

The process was smooth and it kept you informed on what it was doing which is nice.

 

 

When it completed it rebooted (new kernel) and I check again to see if there were more updates.

Saw unexpected network activity

I try to keep an eye on my machine for memory, CPU and network activity on the netbook.  Normally when there is nothing running it is pretty quiet.  Today I installed a number of packages to help me manage the system and my photos among other packages.  I noticed that there was a lot of network activity even when nothing was running and that had me concerned.  I have a limit per month for usage and then I pay.  Even though the usage wasn't a lot (less than a kilo every 10 seconds) it does add up.  I decided to search to see what was doing the activity.  I downloaded iptraf and started there to see what was doing the connections.  I quickly could see port 123 and 1900 were the offenders.  Port 123 is for NTP so I was not too concerned there.  Port 1900 did cause me concern as every 10 seconds it would talk to someone outside my home network.  Next up I ran the lsof command (using SUDO) for 123 and 1900.  My suspicions that 123 was NTP was correct.  Port 1900 was minidlna.  I think it was for some of my multimedia software so I didn't want to kill it.  I did the next best thing, I found the config file and pointed it to eth0 and not wlan0, effectively killing it as I don't have networking set up for that.  Once I made the changes and did a quick reboot (yes, there is probably an easier way, but, it was the easiest for me at that time).  Once I logged back in the network went back to normal.