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Users of social networking sites such as Facebook are giving away vital information that is potentially being used by professional burglars to establish a list of targets. This is according to a recent report from UK insurer, Legal and General, which revealed that nearly 40% of Facebook users posted details of their vacation plans and by doing so, announced when their homes would be empty.

The research also found that users are putting their security at risk by being willing to be friends with people that they don't really know. Nearly half of those surveyed will accept a friend invitation from complete strangers because the person has a nice picture. Other trouble spots concern the posting of addresses (Over 15% of users reported seeing others' residential addresses posted on pages that are accessible to strangers.) and revealing the contents of your home (Almost 70% of users think that social media sites are a great place to share photos of their cool new purchases and presents.).

Burglars can use social networking sites to develop relationships with people, learn what they may own, and find out when they are likely to be away from home. To reduce your odds of becoming a victim, experts suggest the following:

Be particularly careful if you are a new user of Facebook and want to quickly build up your network. Don't let this goal get in the way of good judgment when it comes to friend requests.
When you get a friend request, check to make sure the person is actually a friend of someone you know personally.
Think twice about posting dates of your upcoming trips.
Consider the contents of photos that you post. Do they show valuables in your home?
Be sure to activate the site's privacy features.

We're not trying to steal the fun from social networking sites—keep enjoying the positive connections you're making with old and new friends. Just be careful what information you post and remain mindful of who will see it.

Customer Appreciation & Open House A Success - Congratulations to Door Prize Winners

We want to thank everyone who attended our Open House and Customer Appreciation dinner on September 30th. Over 375 customers were served and many tours of our new office were given.

There were many door prize winners. The winners of the PhotoPhones were Darlene Schmidt, Ann Stevens, Jerome Feilmeier, and Deb Leise.

A PhotoPhone is a cordless phone with a 7" digital picture frame that can display a picture slideshow, and you are able to associate any picture with Caller ID information. As an example, you can have your children or grandkids picture displayed when they are calling. You can see one of these cordless phones on display in the front lobby of our office.

Thanks again to everyone for making the day a success!

Customers with a Hartel email address report finding an email caught in their Postini spam filter with the Subject line of "System Upgrade". The From field indicates that the email is from a system administrator at Hartel. The text of the emails tries to fool the reader into clicking on a link prior to October 16th to save a patch for some reported email server upgrade.

This type of email is a complete hoax! Do NOT click on any link as we have NOT sent out any email notification to our customers regarding any upgrade!

This is a typical scheme to take surfers to an infected site which has the potential to turn their computers into "zombie" machines where the hackers then take control of your PC. As convincing as the email sounds, it does not include our phone number, our standard signature (as at the bottom of this eNewsletter) or other company information.

Please be very careful before clicking on links within emails. If you've seen the above-described email caught in your spam filter, just leave it alone as that is the best place for it. And please carefully scrutinize all emails that ask you to take any kind of action.

Studies show that most people do not have their computer's hard drive protected against an electronic device failure such as a hard drive "crash". Even having a second hard drive installed does not protect against a disaster such as a fire or tornado.

You certainly don't want to lose those precious pictures of your family and grandchildren. Nor would you want to lose your financial data when these types of situations could so easily be averted!

Your best solution is to get Hartelco's Online Backup. Just call Hartelco and we can customize a plan for your single computer, or a whole network of PCs. Your data is automatically scheduled for backup according to your needs to secure data vaults located out of state, and your encrypted data is available for recovery or downloading at a moment's notice 24/7. Plus Online Backup is less expensive than most types of backup systems. If you've never checked into pricing for backups, now is the time.

So give Glen, Rob, or Tyson a call at 254-3901 about Online Backup today!

The Fiber to the Home (FTTH) project is still on schedule according to our contractors and engineers. All conduit has been placed underground and the fiber needs to be placed in the conduit in only a few remaining areas.

Battery packs are now being installed in homes and businesses. These are only used in the event of a power outage, and they do not yet need to be plugged into an electrical outlet to charge the internal battery. We will notify all customers when the battery packs should be charged.

We are busy installing fiber equipment to complement our digital switch in our office, and we plan to start converting customers beginning over the winter months. We expect this conversion process to take nearly all of the 2010 calendar year.

Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) is the delivery of a communication signal over optical fiber from our digital switch all the way to your home or business, thereby replacing existing copper infrastructure that your phone currently uses. Connecting homes and businesses directly to fiber optic cable provides enormous improvements in the bandwidth that can be provided to customers. Optical fiber is able to carry high bandwidth signals over great distances to homes and businesses. Only FTTH can deliver the immense bandwidth that the online and video applications of the future will require.

Hartelco and area businesses will again be webstreaming the audio broadcasts of HOME VARSITY football and basketball games for both Hartington Public and Cedar Catholic this fall and winter sports season.

The webstreaming continues this Friday, October 16th as the #3 ranked Cedar Catholic Trojans host the #2 ranked Ponca Indians in a 7:00pm contest. Pre-game is scheduled for 6:45pm from Russ Hochstein Field at the Hartington Community Complex.

There are several ways to listen to this season's live broadcasts:

Go to www.hartel.net and click on "Listen Live" in the top, right corner.
Switch your Hartelco Cable TV to Channel 13 to listen.
Go to Listen Live at www.hartel.net and listen to the archive of the games within a few hours after the game ends.

Be sure to tell HPS & CCHS alumni, college students, friends, and out of town relatives to "Listen Live"!

Please support the sponsoring businesses and thank them for
bringing you hometown football and basketball this school year!

Question: I have some relatives that are Facebook friends, and they occasionally post messages that contain objectionable language. I don't want to unfriend them since they're family, but I'd like to hide their posts. How can I do that?

Answer: There's an easy way to handle this situation. Go to the post in question and hover over it with your cursor arrow. You'll see the word "Hide" with a triangle to the right of your friend's name. Click on the triangle and it will give you options—either to hide the user or hide a Facebook application. In this case, you'd choose to hide the user. This will prevent you from seeing news feed posts by this friend, and he/she will not know that you hid them.

If this friend comments on one of your posts, the comment will still show up. If they post something offensive, you can delete the post. Just click the "Delete" link under the post, and then click the "Delete" button when the Delete Comment window appears. Even though your friend will not be notified of the deleted post, he/she will probably notice that their comment was deleted.

FluTracker
http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com - If you are curious about the progress of H1N1 (swine) flu, check out this site. It provides global and national maps and charts that reflect the current status of the virus, including the total number of cases reported to date. You can click on the maps for detailed statistics, use the chat function to interact with others on the site in real time, or read comments from users about what's happening with the flu in their areas.

Critical Contact
http://caringbridge.org - Critical illness brings stress and challenges, and contacting family and friends with updates can be a time-consuming challenge in itself. CaringBridge is a nonprofit organization that helps those with critical illnesses easily stay in touch with others through free websites that include areas for background stories, journal entries, photos, resources, and visitor comments. Use the CaringBridge site to offer support, make a donation, or create a site of your own.

The Low Down On Low Rates
http://lowcards.com - LowCards.com is the leading consumer resource for credit card information. Whether you have good credit or bad, this site can help you determine which card makes the most sense for you. They analyze over 1,000 different credit cards and write objective opinions for consumers.

Big Game, Big Food, Big Fun
http://foodnetwork.com/tailgating/package - Keep it simple, fun, and delicious with tailgating tips from the Food Network's Guy Fieri. Watch videos of Guy in action as he cooks up tantalizing tailgating appetizers, main dishes, drinks, and desserts. Guy's step-by-step instructions, prep tips, and the site's recipes will make your next tailgating party a victory, no matter who wins the game.

Homemade Halloween
http://crafts.kaboose.com/costumes/homemade-halloween.html - Ladybugs, pirates, and bears, oh my! From animals and insects to superheroes and favorite movie characters, this site has dozens of costume ideas to buy (inexpensively) or make. Homemade costume ideas feature easy instructions that you and your kids can follow together. Don't forget to find a costume for yourself in the adult costume section.

Your browser's ability to keep a record of the webpages you've visited recently can be a valuable tool when you want to quickly return to one of these pages later. But your browser history can also become a privacy issue, which is why browsers provide the option of deleting it. In addition, deleting your browser history is a good thing to do regularly because cookies and offline webpages can add up and slow down your Internet and computer speeds. Simply follow the steps below for your browser and operating system.

Manually Clearing Your Browser History Using ...
- Internet Browser: Internet Explorer 7
- Computer Operating System: Windows XP

With Internet Explorer open, click your cursor arrow on the "Tools" menu and select "Internet Options" from the resulting drop-down menu.
The Internet Options window will open. In the "Browsing history" section, click on the "Delete..." button.
The Delete Browsing History window will open. Select the "Delete history..." button.
The "Delete History" pop-up box will appear asking if you are sure you want to delete your history of visited websites. Click on the "Yes" button.
Click the red X in the upper right corner to close the Delete Browsing History window and again to close the Internet Options window.

Manually Clearing Your Browser History Using ...
- Internet Browser: Internet Explorer 8
- Computer Operating System: Windows Vista

With Internet Explorer open, click your cursor arrow on the "Safety" menu and select "Delete Browsing History..." from the resulting drop-down menu.
The Delete Browsing History window will open. The box next to "History" should be checked.
Click on the "Delete" button. The "Delete Browsing History" pop-up box will appear showing you the progress of deleting your history and will close automatically when the process is complete.

Internet Explorer 8 also gives you the option of automatically deleting your browsing history upon exiting from the program. To do this, simply follow these steps:

With Internet Explorer open, click your cursor arrow on the "Tools" menu and select "Internet Options" from the resulting drop-down menu.
The Internet Options window will open. While on the "General" tab and in the "Browsing history" section, check the box next to "Delete browsing history on exit."
Next, click on the "Apply" button to save your changes and then click on the "OK" button to close the Internet Options window.

Manually Clearing Your Browser History Using ...
- Internet Browser: Firefox 3.5
- Computer Operating System: Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X

With Firefox open, click your cursor arrow on the "Tools" menu and select "Clear Recent History..." from the resulting drop-down menu.
The Clear Recent History window will open. Click the down arrow next to "Details" and verify that the box next to "Browsing & Download History" is checked.
From the drop-down menu next to the "Time range to clear:" field, choose from the five items listed: "Last Hour," "Last Two Hours," "Last Four Hours," "Today," or "Everything."
Click on the "Clear Now" button.

Manually Clearing Your Browser History Using ...
- Internet Browser: Safari 4
- Computer Operating System: Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X

With Safari open, click your cursor arrow on the "History" menu and select "Clear History" from the resulting drop-down menu.
A pop-up box will appear asking, "Are you sure you want to clear history? You can't undo this action." Click on the "Clear" button.

We hope you found this newsletter to be informative. It's our way of keeping you posted on the happenings here. If, however, you'd prefer not to receive these bulletins on a monthly basis, click here.

Thanks for your business!

Best regards,

The Hartel.net Team

Hartelco
103 W Centre
PO Box 157
Hartington, NE 68739

Ph 402-254-3901

(We have used our best efforts in collecting and preparing the information published herein. However, we do not assume, and hereby disclaim, any and all liability for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions resulted from negligence, accident, or other causes.)

©2009 Cornerstone Publishing Group Inc.

Trademarks: All brand names and product names used in this e-mail are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.