If at any point in time you signed up to be an eBay affiliate (now called being an eBay “partner”), you may be wondering just exactly how and where to find your eBay commissions reports, to figure out how much commission eBay owes you. The search for where to find your eBay commissions can be frustrating; in fact it’s likely you ended up here for that very reason. We don’t blame you for being frustrated, it’s bad enough that eBay seems to constantly be changing how they deal with regular eBay sellers (who are of course raking in cash for eBay; in 2020 alone eBay had revenue of over $10billion (that’s “billion”, with a B). Here’s where to find that information.

“AMPDevicesAgent wants to use your confidential information stored in iOS backup in your keychain” screams the intrusive popup, over and over no matter how many times you tell it “Deny”. Given the relative lack of information provided, and given that the scant information that is provided includes the ominous word “confidential”, of the three choices offered to satisfy the popup, which are ‘allow’ (no), ‘always allow’ (heck no), and ‘deny’ (yes, that one), that last option (‘deny’) should be your default, or even knee-jerk, reaction, especially as the other two options require you to enter your password (eek). At least until you can figure out what the heck it all means.

You may have already heard of Mark Cuban’s drug cost plus program at the “Cost Plus Drugs” website, but you may not really understand what it is, so we’re here to tell you all about it. Basically Mark, a billionaire philanthropist (and many other things), got fed up with the pharmaceutical companies jacking up their prices beyond reasonableness, and so started a company where people could get lifesaving drugs at a reasonable price: cost plus.

A new pep talk hotline, dubbed “Peptok” (get it? Pep Tok, like TikTok) voiced primarily by elementary school children, offers pep talks and life advice for people feeling mad, frustrated or nervous (and who isn’t feeling one or more of those things in these times?), or who need life advice or just need some kind words of encouragement. Or you can just press 4 to hear “kids laughing with delight”. The PepTok pep talk hotline is an enrichment project of the West Side Union Elementary School, in Healdsburg, California, a small town in the San Francisco Bay area, north of San Francisco.

Millions of Amazon Prime customers received the below letter this week, detailing the Amazon Prime price increase from $119 to $139 a year, and from $12.99 to $14.99 a month for the monthly plan. No you can’t get around it, no you can’t buy yourself an Amazon Prime gift card at the old rate (despite many sites saying that you can). According to the letter from Amazon “The new prices, plus applicable taxes, will apply after March 25, 2022, on the date of your next renewal.” However, the new rates are actually effective today, February 18th, 2022. Confused? You won’t be, read on.

Below is the full text of the letter from accounting firm Mazars USA to the Donald Trump Organization. What you heard was that they said that the financial statements for the years 2011 through 2020 should no longer be relied on. But the letter says so much more.

If you recently received email from Google urging you to “understand how new legislation could harm your business”, yet with no information about WHAT legislation they’re talking about, well, that’s because they are hiding the ball on that. (Hint: It’s the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (there may be others, but this is the biggie).)

There is a fresh phishing email scam targeting Reddit users. The Reddit phishing emails exactly mimic the “you have a new follower” Reddit email, but when you click on the “View Follower” button, well, you do get an eyeful, but not the view you were expecting. Generally the purported followers are national brands (we’ve seen samples saying that the new follower is Kroger, and PrudentialFinancial, among others).

The FBI is warning U.S. Olympic athletes who are attending the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, China, to leave their cell phones at home, and instead pick up and bring temporary mobile phones, so-called ‘burner phones’ or disposable phones. The warning, put out last night (January 1, 2022), came from the FBI’s Cyber Division, and was announced as a warning to private industry. While the warning was also geared towards network operators and other industries, the warning specifically, and unusually, speaks directly to individuals as well.

It has been the bane of Mac users’ existences ever since Big Sur: how to prevent Messages from opening a new chat window when you click on a new message that has arrived? Starting with Big Sur, double clicking, or even just newly clicking, on a new message in Messages (formerly iMessage) when transitioning from any other app causes the new message to be opened in a new window, rather than it just going to the message within the Messages list. This happens whether you have your trackpad set to “tap to click” or you have your trackpad set to require an actual physical click (well, even those aren’t actually physical, so we guess that we should say “actual simulated physical click”).

If your Mac mail search is not working in Catalina, Monterey, or Big Sur (or really any other version), read on! Sometimes it’s the most obvious, and simplest, thing that you do last. In 2021 (and now 2022) there were tons of articles and posts answering questions about how to fix email search on a Mac, and many of them suggest complicated (and yes, sometimes necessary) methods for restoring the search function for your Mac email, everything from reindexing Spotlight to reinstalling the OS (eek!). So if email search is not working on your Mac, we’re here to hopefully save you some frustration.

The Amazon billing and fraud prevention scam is back in full force, along with the Apple advisor “your iCloud account has been breached” scam. Each of these scams rely on pre-recorded calls to your phone, and then enticing you to call the “Amazon billing and fraud prevention” department, or an “Apple support advisor,” respectively.

If you are wondering “Where is my Google 1099”, well, you’re not alone in being unable to find your Google 1099. You probably got the same email from Google saying that “You can now find your 1099 for the tax year 2021 online” that has lots of people confused about where to find their Google Adsense 1099 form, because the link in the email from Google doesn’t go to the Google 1099! It goes to your account settings, not your Google 1099!

If you are someone whose eyes glaze over when you try to read a website’s or company’s Terms of Service (“ToS”), Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”) or Privacy Policy, then the TLDR Act is for you (see below for the full text of The TLDR Act)! The TLDR Act (S.3501), which stands for “Terms-of-service Labeling, Design and Readability Act”, was introduced this month by Representative Lori Trahan and Senators Ben Ray Lujan and Bill Cassidy (that’s right, it’s a bipartisan Federal effort).

Here is a sneaky way that Amazon can end up refunding you less than your purchase price for an item that you have returned. Actually there are a couple of ways that you can end up being refunded less than what you paid, but one of them is particularly sneaky, and there is really only one way to make sure that it doesn’t happen to you, which is, unfortunately, not great for the environment.