Conclusion to the Arthur Davidson Email Scam - Lessons in Context Clues and Motorcycles

Back in March I got an email from someone claiming to be a Boston-based intellectual property attorney working for the law firm of Arthur Davidson. The email was poorly formatted and had some other errors that made me think the email might not be from a legitimate attorney's office. The email also happened to arrive on a day when I was feeling particularly grumpy so I decided to do a little sleuthing to see if I could unravel what I was fairly certain was a scam designed to get me to put a link to a nefarious website on my blog. 

There were a lot of routes that I could have taken to pulling back the curtain on this scam. As you can see in the video that I made about it, I unraveled the scam by using some context clues which led me to then use some research tools including WHOIS lookup, reverse image search, Google Maps, and the Wayback Machine. 

April Update

In April I discovered that a few other folks had gotten the same email from Arthur Davidson and decided to also unravel the scam. So much so that that the scammers switched from using the domain ArthurDavidson.com to ArthurDavidsonLegal.com.

June Update and Conclusion...for now

Just out of curiosity I checked to see if ArthurDavidsonLegal.com was still being used to try to run a backlinking scam. It turns out that the website has been suspended by the host. I'm guessing that enough people or the right person complained to the hosting service and got the site suspended for running a fraud. 

Motorcycles!

If the name Arthur Davidson sounds familiar to you outside of the context of a fake legal firm, you probably have an interest in motorcycles and or you teach U.S. History. Arthur Davidson was one of the founders of Harley Davidson. Did the scammers who set up the fake legal firm of ArthurDavidson.com and ArthurDavidsonLegal.com know who Arthur Davidson was? Possibly. Did they choose those domains to attempt to rank well in search results? Probably, but I have no way of knowing that for sure. 

You can learn more about the real Arthur Davidson and the founding of Harley Davidson Motorcycles in this nice Google Arts and Culture story. 

A New Way to Find Registration-free Tools

No-Signup Tools is a new site that features exactly what its name implies, web tools that you can use for free without having to sign-up for an account. You can browse through No-Signup Tools alphabetically, by ranking, or by category. Browsing the categories is probably the best way to use No-Signup Tools. 

The No-Signup Tools categories of interest to readers of this blog will probably be teaching, writing, and productivity. It was in those categories that I found helpful tools like Math Homework Generator, Egg Timer, and saw an old favorite called Hemingway App. 

Here's a demo of Hemingway App. 

Applications for Education
Web tools that don't require registration or other personal information can be great for students who don't have email addresses and they can be great for those of us who just don't want to give our email addresses to yet another website.

No-Signup Tools is good, but it isn't specific to education. For a similar resource that was specifically created with teachers and students in mind, take a look at Nathan Hall's list of No Registration Needed Tools.

How to Work While Going to School

Last month I started watching a new Crash Course series called How to College. The series is a great one for students who are first generation college students and or those who just don't have anyone to seek out for advice about things like paying for college and picking a major. The latest video in the How to College series is titled How to Work in College. 

Watching How to Work in College took me back to my days of loading trucks at RPS (now known as FedEx Ground) at night and in the early mornings to pay for my college education. I was fortunate that RPS put an extra 50 cents per hour into a tuition reimbursement fund that I used every semester to pay for my textbooks (they were a lot cheaper 20-something years ago). It's little perks like that and the networking opportunities that can come out of working in college that How to Work in College does a good job of explaining in the video. 

How to Work in College also does a good job of trying to help viewers understand the importance of scheduling their time and it provides some tips for blocking distractions when it is time to focus on school work. 

For more information about how to pay for college beyond working a part-time job, students should watch Crash Course's How to Pay for College.

Unpoppable Bubbles - Another Fun Summer Science Lesson

Last week I shared a handful of resources for building solar ovens. The week before that I shared some at-home summer science lesson resources from Discovery and 3M. Today, I have another summer science lesson resource to share with you. 

Earlier this week SciShow Kids published a new video titled Unpoppable Bubbles. In the video they don't actually make unpoppable bubbles. Instead, they talk about how bubbles are made and propose some ideas for making bubble mixtures to test to see if it is possible to make an unpoppable bubble. 

Applications for Education

Trying to make an unpoppable bubble or at least experimenting with different bubble solutions could be a fun way for parents to introduce their children to some concepts like surface tension and viscosity. For a little more structured lesson centered around bubbles, take a look at the Bubble-ology lesson plan on the Science Buddies website. That's what I plan to loosely follow the next time I make bubbles with my kids this summer.

Five Things I Like About the New Chromebook Screencast Recorder

Last week Google introduced a new way to record screencasts on your Chromebook. You can watch my tutorial about how to use it right here or as embedded at the end of this blog post. After a week of using it, here are five things that I like about it and I think will be helpful to teachers and students going forward.  

Automatic Transcripts
All of the screencasts that you create with the Chrome OS screen recorder are automatically transcribed for you. Those transcripts are timestamped to make it easy to read through them and click to the corresponding section of your video. You can edit the transcripts to correct any errors. An example of an error that I always have to correct appears whenever I say my last name in a video. Byrne always appears as Burn in the automatically generated transcript.

Automatic Transcript Translation
When students view your video and its corresponding transcript they can choose to read the transcript in English or in another language of their choice. Jump to the 1:36 mark in this video to see how students can view translated transcripts of your screencast videos.

Autosave to Google Drive
As you would expect from a tool created by Google, all of the screencasts you create with the Chromebook screencast recorder are automatically saved in your Google Drive account. Like everything else in your Google Drive, you can quickly and easily share your videos with your students in Google Classroom.

Quick Launch
The Chrome OS screencast recorder launches faster than any of the browser-based screencasting tools that I've tried. This is probably due to the fact that the screencast recorder is part of the OS and not an external third-party service running in Chrome. You'll notice in my demo video that I didn't have select what I wanted to capture on my screen. That's different than every other screencasting tool I've used on Chromebooks. All of those other tools require you to specify if you want to record a tab, a window, or the whole screen before you start recording.

Drawing Tools
You'll notice that the Chrome OS screencast recorder doesn't have as many drawing options as some other screencasting tools. Initially, I was a little disappointed by that. But on further consideration, I realized that I don't actually use all of the drawing tools in those other screencasting tools anyway. And the limiting of drawing options probably helps to keep the Chrome OS screencast recorder running faster and smoother than if Google had tried to cram a bunch of features into the initial launch of the recorder.

Watch my video below to see how the new screencasting tool built into Chromebooks works.

Important! Update your Chromebook to the latest version of Chrome OS to access the new screencasting tool to record a screencast on your Chromebook.