NBC News recently posted an interesting article where the author notes that the spam industry follows the same Law of Supply and Demand as any capitalist-loving business does. As social networks crack down on fake accounts and fake news, the spam industry is able to charge their customers more to establish such inauthentic accounts.

Facebook shut down as many as 30,000 fake accounts in the past week — but that's unlikely to hurt the multi-million-dollar spam industry.

In fact, since Facebook's post-election housecleaning, it's become even more lucrative for spammers to pump out "inauthentic accounts." The asking price on the black market for 1,000 fake accounts used to be $20, but security changes by the social network giant only succeeded in driving up prices.

"If you go to the underground markets where they sell fake Facebook accounts, you can buy 1,000 of these for $300 to $400," Damon McCoy, a New York University computer science professor specializing in cybercrime, told NBC News.

Fighting inauthentic accounts and inauthentic activity is not new to social networks. In recent years, Facebook has put a lot of effort into reducing such activities by closing accounts responsible for fake likes and fake news. Last week, Shabnam Shaik, Facebook's Security Technical Program Manager, acknowledged  the recent efforts of his security team to fight the spread of misinformation on their social network.

Yesterday, I was the victim of an April Fool's prank. When you have a young teenager in the house, I suppose it's inevitably going to happen. I walked into my office and found Teletubbies on the screen. If there is a children's show I have to pick as my least favorite it is the Teletubbies. To make things worse, as the IT expert at both home and work I couldn't figure out how to get the video off my screen.

Well played my son. To be honest, this is the first of your April Fool's pranks that I didn't see coming. Now that I'm aware you're getting smarter and more devious, I'll be better prepared for you next year. 

For the record, growing up it was the character Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street I liked the most. Let's not also forget another one of my favorites, the Adventures of Letterman via the Electric Company.   

Although I retired last year from writing stories solely focused on content management systems, I still have a few of my favorites that I like to keep an eye on. One of those favorites is DNN which back in the day we once called DotNetNuke. Less than a year ago, DNN brought to market Evoq 8 which addressed modern day marketing needs for better customer engagement. Last week, DNN showed the industry the ongoing evolution of its product line through Evoq 9. The new release continue's DNN's journey to be more than CMS company as it reaches beyond websites to apps, devices, and other Internet of Things.

Evoq 9's goal is to deliver omnichannel publishing via a microservices architecture. To make this happen, Evoq 9 includes Liquid Content, a new Content as a Service platform that is delivered as a service via DNN’s cloud platform, Liquid Content Cloud. Features included in Liquid Content:

I wrote something similar to this on my Facebook page today.

I think I've only posted about half a dozen political posts these past two years. Admittedly, for reasons I care not to discuss here, I didn't invest a lot of emotion into this election cycle. What has disappointed me most about this election isn't the election results despite my opposition to Trump but the behavior of friends, peers, and acquaintances. I've seen friends, relatives, and in-laws burn bridges on long-term relationships for nothing more than the sake to showing their anger against another one's viewpoint via social media. I can survive four years of Trump, but witnessing the lack of respect people are showing one another is a much more difficult hurdle for me to go through emotionally and spiritually.

I wrote in comment on another friends post that I think a lot of the discussion of late is the results of both sides demonizing the other side and refusing to acknowledge the human side of the equation. Neither Trump or Clinton are evil people yet many have come to believe such is true about the opposing candidate. When you take this approach it ultimately backfires on you and as a whole on our nation. Anger can be a good tool for motivation, but when we display hatred toward others we really have gone too far.

I don't think I want to do this anymore...

After three or four decades of being immersed in the digital lifestyle and blogging on a continual basis for 15 years, I found myself puking at the idea of spending more time in front of the computer outside of work. It's not that I don't still like technology and content management, but I didn't recognize until it was too late that the lack of topic diversity would eventually lead me to digital burnout. To fix this, I seriously tried not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the end that's exactly what I did.

Having walked away from CMS Report earlier this year, it's taken me months to recognize that the problem wasn't being bored with content management systems. The problem is I didn't do it in moderation.  Between my day job working in information technology and the evenings spent blogging and running personal websites, there were days I spent close to 16 hours in front of a computer screen. For someone like me that can be over enthusiastic in pursuing my interests and activities, I never considered my computer time as work. As odd as it sounds, it became a great shock to me that my body both physically and mentally still perceived it as work.